i
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ______________________________________________________ i
Summary ____________________________________________________________ iii
Acknowledgments _____________________________________________________ iv
Acronyms ____________________________________________________________ vi
Chapter One: Positioning Trafficking in Women ____________________________ 1
Defining trafficking in women ___________________________________________ 4
Contextualising Consent: The Forced/Voluntary Dichotomy __________________ 15
The Vienna negotiations concerning the 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol __________ 29
Myth and consent ____________________________________________________ 32
Chapter Two: White slavery and trafficking as political myth ________________ 39
Myth and ideology ___________________________________________________ 40
Ideology, truth and power ______________________________________________ 46
True myths? _________________________________________________________ 51
Myth and its political effects ____________________________________________ 57
Chapter Three: The construction of innocence and the spectre of chaos ________ 60
Narrative and truth ___________________________________________________ 62
The white slave (appearances and apparitions) ______________________________ 66
Writing and speaking the white slave _____________________________________ 73
Empire and race in the construction of white slavery _________________________ 83
Narrative, ideology, and political effects __________________________________ 85
Chapter Four: Metaphorical innocence: white slavery in America _____________ 87
Metaphor and myth ___________________________________________________ 87
The American anti-white slavery campaign ________________________________ 90
How white was white slavery? __________________________________________ 96
Immigration and white slavery _________________________________________ 106
Feminism and white slavery in America __________________________________ 115
Commercialisation: ‘The rise of the pimp system’ __________________________ 118
Metaphor and myth redux _____________________________________________ 121
ii
Chapter Five: ‘Prevent, protect and punish’ ______________________________ 124
Interrupting the innocent victim ________________________________________ 124
The Protocol on Trafficking in Persons: background ________________________ 129
Lobbying in Vienna__________________________________________________ 131
The two sides of the Protocol __________________________________________ 137
Moral Panics and Boundary Crisis ______________________________________ 142
Suffering bodies, protection and ressentiment _____________________________ 149
The trafficker _______________________________________________________ 156
The results of anti-trafficking campaigns _________________________________ 158
Disappearing sex workers? ____________________________________________ 161
Chapter Six: Now you see her, now you don’t: consent, sex workers and the Human
Rights Caucus _______________________________________________________ 162
De-linking prostitution and trafficking ___________________________________ 163
Putting the lobby together _____________________________________________ 164
Visible protest, invisible influence ______________________________________ 168
The disappearing prostitute and the definition of trafficking __________________ 171
What’s wrong with sexual exploitation? __________________________________ 179
Consent to trafficking? _______________________________________________ 183
The disappearing subject of trafficking (lose the myth, and who’s left?) _________ 187
Chapter Seven: Towards a reinscription of myth __________________________ 188
Trafficking in women, myth and consent _________________________________ 188
Why trafficking, why now? ___________________________________________ 189
Sex work, myth and reinscriptions ______________________________________ 191
The new subject of myth ______________________________________________ 192
Bibliography ________________________________________________________ 196
Appendix I: Research Methods _________________________________________ 214
Appendix II: Descriptions of NGOs _____________________________________ 216
iii
Summary
The issue of women being trafficked into prostitution has resurfaced as a matter of
international concern after remaining dormant for nearly 80 years. My DPhil research
investigates the causes of the resurgence of interest in trafficking in women. It compares
historical debates and state policies around ‘white slavery’ with contemporary debates and state
and international policies on ‘trafficking in women.’ The research focuses on the way the
discourses of ‘trafficking in women’ and ‘white slavery’ reflect the construction of state/gender
relations; anxieties concerning female sexuality and women’s autonomy; and Western
representations of other cultures. It explores the relationship between current processes of
economic change/crisis, migration and the policing of state boundaries, changes in women’s
status, women’s involvement in sex work, and the re-emergence of trafficking in women as a
cause for international concern. While a significant body of literature examining white slavery
has emerged in the last twenty years, there have been virtually no attempts to examine the
construction of contemporary discourses of ‘trafficking in women’. This research traces the
genealogy of the concept of trafficking in women through the application of insights gained by
historical research.
The analytical framework for the research is political discourse analysis, combining a Foucault
and Derrida inspired deconstructionist approach with the post-Marxist arguments of theorists
such as Laclau and insights from feminist and post-colonial theory. It is based on an
examination of historical documents concerning white slavery; current research, policy, and
NGO documents on 'trafficking in women'. My research compares historical with current
trends in Britain, the United States and in the international arena. The locus of the bulk of the
research on contemporary debates is the negotiations around the new UN Trafficking
Protocol, which I attended as a participant in a feminist lobby group.
iv
Acknowledgments
This thesis was inspired by the work of the wonderful sex workers and sex worker rights
activists that I have worked with throughout the years, and especially my colleagues at the
Network of Sex Work Projects. I would like to thank Cheryl Overs, Paulo Longo, Shane
Petzer, Andrew Hunter, Melissa Ditmore and Penny Saunders for keeping me believing that
my research was worthwhile. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Penny Saunders for her helpful
comments on a draft of this thesis.
I would also like to thank the members of the Human Rights Caucus, with whom I shared an
intense and exiting political experience.
My supervisors, Dr. Andrea Cornwall and Dr. Anne-Marie Goetz, were a constant source of
support throughout the process of writing this thesis. They challenged me and inspired me,
encouraging me continually to push myself and my analysis. They continued to believe in me,
even when I doubted myself.
My research would not have been possible without the financial support of the ESCR. In
particular, I would like to thank Chris Read for his understanding and support.
I would also like to thank Matt Gaw for his excellent editing of the thesis.
At IDS, my fellow DPhil students gave me a very supportive atmosphere to work in. Naomi
Hussain provided loads of laughter and insightful comments on my writing. Marc Fiedrich,
from our first shared coffee through to the final paragraph, has been a constant source of help
and inspiration. Kath Pasteur provided a much-needed refuge. Dom Furlong, Charlie Severs,
Jen Leavy and Susie Jolly kept reminding me that there was life outside the DPhil.
v
Also at IDS, Sue Ong, Julia Brown and Angela Dowman helped me unfailingly and always
with a smile to sort out the often bewildering administrative matters. Chris Stevens gave
excellent support as the Director of Graduate Programmes.
My partner, Ruth Mackenzie, has shown enormous patience throughout, and her love, care
and encouragement never flagged. Finally, I could not have completed the thesis without the
deep love and support of my parents, David and Carolyn Doezema, who believed in me when
times were the hardest.
vi
Acronyms
AWHRC: Asian Women’s Human Rights Council
CATW: The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
CD Acts: Contagious Diseases Acts
DMSC: Durnar Mahila Samanwaya Committee
GAATW: Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
HRC: Human Rights Caucus
ILO: International Labour Organisation
INGO: International Non-Governmental Organisation
IOM: International Organisation for Migration
IUSW: International Union of Sex Workers
NGO: Non-governmental Organisation
NSWP: The Network of Sex Work Projects
NVA: National Vigilance Association
PATH: Programme for Appropriate Technologies in Health
TAMPEP: Transnational IDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe
UNHCHR: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
UNICEF: United Nations Children’s Fund
UK NSWP: United Kindom Network of Sex Work Projects
WHISPER: Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt
1
Chapter One: Positioning Trafficking in
Women
‘Italy's sex slaves’
Young women from Africa and Eastern Europe are
lured to Italy with the promise of good jobs and a new
life. But when they get there they are beaten, raped and
forced into prostitution.….Most of the girls we talk to
– a group of Libyans, a dark-haired Romanian with a
scarred face, a young mother from the Ukraine – didn't
come here to be prostitutes. They thought they were coming to Italy to make money
working in a hair salon, a bar or as an au pair. But the people who made those
promises and smuggled them into the country took away their passports and forced
them to work the streets instead. The immigrants, most who barely speak Italian,
usually work 12-hour shifts, engaging in quick sexual encounters in clients' cars or
behind bushes by the road. Most have pimps who monitor their every move by cell
phone. Some are brought to their places on the streets blindfolded, so they won't
know the route home in case they try to escape. They're locked up during the day,
beaten if they don't work hard enough, and rarely see any of the money they earn….
At one desolate corner, we stop and let a Nigerian, Marika, into the van… She's
wearing a miniskirt that barely covers her bottom, gold eye shadow, a ratty pair of
high-heeled black boots, long fake black braids, and a top that reveals most of her
breasts. Marika complains that there isn't much work this evening, because there are
too many police in the area (while prostitution on the streets is legal in Italy, the girls
get hassled anyway). She's worried because she still owes $15,000 to the people who
brought her here, even though she's already paid them $40,000 -- at about $5 per fiveminute trick. "Two more years," she tells me wearily, "and I can do some other kind
of work." It may be longer, though, if her recent luck holds up -- she was robbed a
few days before at gunpoint by a client who took all her money.
"When I came here," she says, "I thought I was getting a job at a supermarket." She
rolls her eyes at her childish naiveté -- she was 19 then, and now she's a much older,
harder 21. But at least, she tells me, she doesn't have the problems the Albanian
women on the street have. "The Albanian women are raped by their pimps, but not
the Africans," she tells me in her broken Italian. "The Albanians hit them. All I have
to do is pay back my debt" (Salon, 01-08-03).1
1
This story (as do many other newspaper accounts) sparked off a discussion on the NSWP on-line discussion list.
The discussion started around the suggestion that the woman was charging $5 a trick. Members found a price this
low difficult to believe – even more so when the person was supposedly a trafficking victim. As one list member
put it:
What do others think of the $5 sex slaves in this article? I find it hard to believe. $5 is just too low for
me to conceive that this is a trafficking situation. My sense is that if she had to make money for others,
2
‘Human Trafficking: Charming Girls And Greedy Merchants!’
Trafficking in girls and women has easily become the modern parallel to the Atlantic
slave trade. …Pretty Osaro was in the 200 level class in a prominent university when
she lost her father in a car accident in 1999. Thereafter things became so difficult such
that she had to leave the university and take up job as a cashier in a super market in
Benin City to help with the upkeep of the family. One fateful afternoon, precisely 2nd
March 2000, an expensively dressed lady of Osaro's age glided into the supermarket
clutching a mobile phone. She turned out to be Ogechi, Osaro's childhood friend,
with whom she had lost contact for years, and who now claimed to work as a model
in Italy. She promised to link Osaro with a friend who will facilitate her movement to
Italy where she would work and earn big money.
Ogechi kept her promise and a week later Osaro's passport and visa were ready. In
Italy her travelling papers were seized, and she was thereafter sold like a chattel to a
"madam" who forced her to sleep with different men. She was however caught one
day while on her way from the hospital where she had gone for treatment by the
Italian Police, and she was repatriated back to the country along with some
Nigerian girls.
Like Osaro, thousands of women and girls are being lured and coerced from the
developing countries and also eastern Europe, to Italy, Spain, Paris, Zurich etc. every
year, to engage in prostitution. Conservative estimates put the number of women and
girls smuggled each year into the sex trade in Europe, at over a million world-wide.
This is twice the International Organisation for Migration's (IOM) estimated 500,000
for 1995 (The Daily Trust, Abuja 22-01-02).
‘Filipinas end up as fun girls in South Korea’
They are called *juicy girls,* a back handed compliment to their youth and beauty. But
the local slang for Filipino *entertainers* in Songjan City barely masks the harsh fates
of the young, hopeful women who end up captives of a white slavery syndicate. Their
plight has sparked tensions among Korean bar owners in Songjan, and FilipinoAmerican servicemen, who are suspected of having helped in the escape of some sex
slaves….. Maxi works in an area reminiscent of Fields Avenue, once the red-light
district of Angeles City, when American troops were still stationed in Clark Air Base.
Living hell
Maxi and colleagues dance naked for customers and provide sexual favors. For $200,
they will perform all imaginable sex acts for clients. They only get 30 percent of the
they'd at least try to get more money. Someone involved at some level would have to see this as a
business, and therefore want reasonable money' (NSWP list-serve 30-07-03).
A response to this question refers to the lack of actual 'sex slaves' in the body of the article itself:
the article doesn't actually talk about trafficking per se ... the woman who says she charges $5 doesn't
say what for, exactly, but she also doesn't explain (sic) [complain] of being totally controlled by anyone.
she's taking a long time to pay off a debt and is bitter about being lied to, but she appears to have
leeway in her life. So the headline about sex slaves is typical sensationalism' (NSWP list-serve, 31-0703).
3
fee, what their Hajuma or Mama San calls their *commission.* …Philippine and
Korean officials say there is little they can do in the absence of a law against human
trafficking…Korean officials curtly deny the existence of white slavery despite charges
raised by Seoul-based religious and civic groups (The Manila Times, 03-01-02).
What is trafficking in women? After reading stories like these, the answer to the question may
seem to be completely obvious.2 While the average newspaper reader is not likely to be familiar
with the sources of the quoted statistics and the politics of the groups that produce the reports,
the picture painted by such stories (which are only three examples of thousands produced over
the last decade) seems fairly clear: trafficking in women means young women and girls being
transported and forced into prostitution. Accounts such as these, with their graphic accounts
of violence, heart-rending first person testimonies, and ominous warnings of the increasing
nature of the problem, paint a picture that disturbs and distresses readers and create a sense of
urgency that ‘something must be done’ to stop the problem.
In reports like those above, an image of the ‘typical’ trafficking victim becomes evident. Even
in these few examples, we can begin to see an emphasis on certain words and phrases: ‘young’,
‘naïve’, beauty’, ‘better life’ ‘lured, deceived and forced into prostitution’ . These words show
us the youth and beauty of the victims, their desperate economic plight, their lack of
knowledge as to the fate that awaits them, and their transformation from hopeful to hopeless,
‘naïve’ to ‘hardened’, as the ‘life on the streets’ takes its toll. The image of the traffickers also
emerges: shadowy syndicates, mysterious ladies who glide and tempt, brutal Eastern
Europeans and rapacious Africans – all lying in wait to prey upon the naïve and innocent
young girl. If my tone sounds melodramatic, it is deliberately so. The above accounts, as is
explored in Chapters Three and Four, borrow their structure from melodramatic narrative.
They tell a familiar tale of a the loss of female virtue, the essence of 19th century pennydreadful seduction stories (Haag 1999; Walkowitz 1992) recast for a contemporary audience. A
young girl falls into the hands of malevolent men or tainted women, consequently to lose her
(sexual) innocence. Like their 19th century counterparts, these popular accounts also combine
2
When I have told people – many of whom are not in any way involved in the issue – that the topic of my thesis
is trafficking in women, not one person has said ‘what is that?’. Without exception, the response has been to
affirm the horror of the problem, how good it was I was working on it, and often to recount a story such as these
they had recently seen or read about in the media.
4
salaciousness with moral righteousness – causing in the reader a discomfiting but also
pleasurable mix of outrage and titillation.
Defining trafficking in women
How then are we to define trafficking in women? Definitions abound. Often, they are
accompanied by calls for better definitions that appeal to the ‘real’ situation – the need for a
definition that will more accurately reflect what is really going on.3 When I began working in
the field of trafficking, in 1994, very little research on the subject existed. Trafficking was
mainly the preserve of feminist NGOs, who were focused on front-line care and lobbying
governments. As their lobby efforts became more successful in arousing public concern (and
funding), opportunities for research grew. The concern with trafficking has led to a large
amount of new research, much of it encouraged by governments worried about, not only their
international reputation, but by restive native populations grousing about the floods of illegals
washing onto national shores.
Despite the increase in research, it is still difficult to affix a number to trafficking. A recent
report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) examines the problems around
the lack of statistical evidence on trafficking. The report states: 'It is almost axiomatic for
papers reviewing trafficking to lament the huge lack of statistics and to call for research to fill
the many lacunae' (IOM 2000: 30). And indeed, the lack of statistical evidence is mentioned in
nearly all of the reports, papers, and statements that I have reviewed. This does not, however,
lead to the degree of caution that might be expected. While acknowledging the difficulty of
putting hard and fast numbers to trafficking, most reports go on to quote large numbers
without any indication of what they are actually referring to: 'The lack of hard data, combined
with the fact that many commentators on trafficking repeat estimates derived from interviews
with officials, means that many of the statistics quoted are in (often large) round numbers, are
uncheckable and are frequently reiterated' (IOM 2000: 31).
3
As Hajer explains regarding the definition of ecological problems: ‘The political conflict is hidden in the
question of what definition is given to the problem, which aspects of social reality are included and which are left
undiscussed…various actors are likely to hold different perceptions of what the problem ‘really is’' (Hajer 1995).
5
While making this valuable point, the IOM itself provides a telling example of the carelessness
with which statistics on trafficking are treated.
‘500,000 in Western Europe alone’
CEE and the NIS now constitute the fastest growing source for trafficked women
and girls for the sex industry. A US Government source has conservatively estimated
that more than 175,000 women and girls are trafficked from CEE and the NIS each
year. In 1995, IOM estimated the number at 500,000 annually to Western Europe
alone (OSCE 1999: 7)
How are we to interpret the number 500,000? In the context in which it is presented, it would
seem to have to be a misprint, as 500,000 is much larger than the total of 175,000 trafficked
women mentioned in the earlier paragraph. The number itself is not directly referenced,
however, a list of resources at the end of the OSCE report mentions a 1995 IOM report (IOM
1995). The number 500,000 does not appear anywhere in this report. Given that it seems so
obviously a misprint, it would be tempting to dismiss it. However, this number is mentioned
repeatedly when trafficking in Europe in being mentioned. The number 500,000 has gone on
to live a life of its own in newspaper reports, for example: ‘It is estimated that around 500,000
women have been beaten or drugged into submission by pimps working in Europe's biggest
organised crime gang’ (The Mirror, Dublin, 04-07-2000).
I checked all possible sources to track down the basis for the number of 500,000, reviewing
IOM publications and writing and phoning the IOM in Geneva and in Brussels. I was unable
to find any material indicating how the IOM arrived at this number. One official in Geneva
suggested that the number had been cited in a presentation by an IOM official at a meeting of
the European Parliament, and picked up by journalists there. I was unable to confirm this.
Most reports on trafficking tend to assume that estimates of trafficking are too low, rather than
too high: 'Despite the lack of concrete statistical data, experts in the field agree that it is a
growing (and evolving) phenomenon' (OSCE 1999: 5). One of the reasons most often given
for the lack of evidence on trafficking is that it is a 'hidden' phenomenon, taking place in the
'underworld', and that victims of trafficking are too afraid of reprisals to report to the police.
Another reason given is the lack of specific legislation relating to trafficking, so that figures for
6
complaints, arrests and convictions are very difficult to obtain. While this may be the case, the
lack of reliable evidence of trafficking has done little to diminish the anxiousness around the
issue.
One problem in attempting to glean anything meaningful from trafficking statistics is that it is
rarely clear exactly what is being measured. As the examples above show, the term trafficking
is anything but unambiguous, and can refer to a number of different situations. The IOM
report is one of many that notes that trafficking is often confused with 'smuggling' or with
numbers of illegal migrants (IOM 2000).4 This is confirmed in a highly influential report on
international trafficking by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW).5
The authors note that when statistics are available, they usually refer to the number of migrant
sex workers, rather than cases of trafficking : ‘when statistics are available, they usually refer to
the number of migrant or domestic sex workers, rather than cases of trafficking (Wijers and
Lap-Chew 1997: 15). As Guy (1991) records, statistics on white slavery to Buenos Aires were
based on the numbers and nationalities of registered prostitutes. In a striking parallel, a Global
Survival Network (GSN) report (1997) uses the rise in numbers of Russian, Eastern European
and NIS women in the sex industry in western Europe and the US as evidence of trafficking.
But even these figures are not to be trusted: Kempadoo notes the extreme variations in
estimates of numbers of prostitutes in Asia: estimates for the city of Bombay alone range from
100,000 to 600,000. As she remarks: ‘To any conscientious social scientist, such discrepancies
should be cause for extreme suspicion of the reliability of the research, yet when it comes to
sex work and prostitution, few eyebrows are raised and the figures are easily bandied about
without question’ (1998a: 15).
The problem of collapsing trafficking into 'illegal migration' or 'migrant prostitution' is
compounded by the fact that when official statistics on trafficking exist, they are most often
compiled by police and ministries of justice. Some countries have no laws on trafficking,
others, such as Austria, include any transportation of a woman across a border under
trafficking (IOM 2000). What does appear to be clear is that the number of migrant sex
4
See also Augustin (2002; 2003).
The report was commissioned by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women from the Global
Alliance Against Trafficking in Women.
5
7
workers is increasing throughout the world (Mak 1996; TAMPEP 1999; Brussa 1999). In
Europe, sex workers are on the move from Eastern to Western Europe or from one country
to another within these areas. Sex workers from Europe, Asia and Latin America hope to
better their earnings in the USA, the Middle East, and affluent Asian countries. It is very
tempting in this situation to see trafficking where the only certain element is migration.6
Even when authors are admirably clear about what they consider trafficking to be, numbers are
used that may not conform to their chosen definition. A 1999 OSCE report contains a very
clear definition of trafficking, that stresses the elements of coercion and forced labour (OSCE
1999). It states that trafficking involves men as well as women and children, and that it can
occur for purposes other than forced prostitution. However, when numbers are recounted,
this is done in such a way as to give the impression that most of the women are trafficked for
prostitution:
Every year, millions of men, women and children are trafficked worldwide into
conditions amounting to slavery. Among these, many thousands are young women
and girls lured, abducted, or sold into forced prostitution and other forms of sexual
servitude…In 1997, an estimated 175,000 women and girls were trafficked from
Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States alone' (OSCE 1999:
3).
The placing of the preceding sentence in the quoted paragraph gives the impression that these
women have all been trafficked for prostitution. It is impossible to tell how this number was
arrived at, and on what sort of evidence it is based.
Significantly, there are emerging indications that it is sex workers, rather than ‘coerced
innocents’ that form the majority of this ‘traffic’. GAATW, whose report is based for a large
part on responses of organisations that work directly with ‘trafficking victims’, found that the
majority of trafficking cases involve women who know they are going to work in the sex
industry, but are lied to about the conditions they will work under, such as the amount of
money they will receive, or the amount of debt they have to repay (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997:
99). They also conclude that abduction for purposes of trafficking into the sex industry is rare
(p. 99). GSN (1997) relates the testimonies of a number of women who had been sex workers
before their migration and who were lied to about working conditions, rather than the nature
6
The IOM (2000), while admirably cautious about using migration as a proxy for trafficking, falls into this trap
even as it warns against it.
8
of the work. Research by the Foundation for Women in Thailand concluded that the largest
group of Thai migrants working in the sex industry in Japan had previously worked in the sex
industry in Bangkok (Skrobanek 1997). Watenabe (Watenabe 1998), who worked as a bar girl
herself in Japan in the course of her research into Thai women migrating to the Japanese sex
industry, found that the majority of sex workers she interviewed were aware of the nature of
the work on offer. Other research, such as that by Brockett and Murray (Brockett and Murray
1994) in Australia, Anarfi (Anarfi 1998) in Ghana, Kempadoo (Kempadoo 1998b) in the
Caribbean, COIN (COIN 1994) in the Dominican Republic, TAMPEP in Europe (Brussa
1999), Gü¨lçür and Iÿlkkaracan (2002) in Turkey, Blanchet (2002) in Saudi Arabia, India, Nepal
and Bangladesh, and Pearson (2002) in England, Italy, Thailand and the US, indicates that
women seeking to migrate are not so easily ‘duped’ or ‘deceived’, and are often aware that
most jobs on offer are in the sex industry.
Trafficking is not a discursively neutral terrain, unwritten and unblemished, upon which facts
and responses can simply be attached. Even a recognition that disputes over the meaning of
trafficking involves politics and ideology does not go far enough: it still leaves intact the idea
that trafficking can be defined satisfactorily if political will, clear thinking and practicality
prevail. If it becomes increasingly difficult to pin down exactly what ‘trafficking’ might be and
who the victims are, one thing the ‘evidence’ does point to is how emotionally potent the
images used in trafficking narratives are. This is not the first time that such images have been
used to evoke a more generalised sense of moral panic, or the first time that feminists and
other political actors have employed this images in calls for intervention.
The resurrection of a modern myth?
Contemporary concerns with prostitution and trafficking in women find a historical precedent
in the anti-white slavery campaigns that occurred at the turn of the century. Feminist
organisations played a central role in both past and present campaigns (Walkowitz 1980,
Doezema 2000). Typical white slavery narratives involved the abduction of European women
for prostitution in South America, Africa or ‘the Orient’ by ‘foreigners’. In the contemporary
campaigns starting in the early 1980s, the focus was originally on the ‘traffic’ from Latin
9
America and Asia to western Europe.7 The geographical direction of the ‘traffic’ has changed.
Yet, the rhetoric accompanying campaigns against trafficking in women is strikingly similar to
that used by turn of the century anti-white slavery activists. Then as now, the paradigmatic
image is that of a young and naive innocent, (assumed to be female) lured or deceived by evil
traffickers, (assumed to be male) into a life of horrifying sexual degradation from which escape
is virtually impossible.
From the time they were produced to the present time, the narratives of the ‘white slave trade’
have been accepted as literal truth by many, including many feminists. However, a number of
contemporary historians question the actual extent of the ‘white slave trade’. Their research
suggests that the actual number of cases of white slavery was very low (Bristow 1977, 1982;
Connelly 1980; Corbin 1990; M. Gibson 1986; Grittner 1990; Guy 1991; Fisher 1997;
Haveman 1998; Rosen 1982; Walkowitz 1980, 1992). For a number of historians, the lack of
hard empirical evidence about the scope of the phenomena has led to analyses that have
sought to locate discourses of white slavery on a broader ideological terrain, looking at both
their discursive and material consequences.
In attempting to ascertain the extent of white slavery, most historians have attempted to verify
the trade through using its own terms, ‘projecting themselves into the past.’ That is, they take
the dominant meaning of white slavery and look for evidence to support or debunk it in a
variety of empirical sources, including arrest records from police files and prostitutes’
testimonies to immigration officials. Thus, they look for empirical evidence of innocent young
girls being kidnapped, deceived, drugged or otherwise coercively obtained and forced to be
prostitutes. But their efforts unearthed scare evidence of this sort. Corbin (1990), who
examines the French campaign, consulted judicial and police records and government reports.
Typical of the reported statistics was the finding that after the adoption of a new law against
white slavery in 1903 and 1906, 754 ‘pimps’ were arrested. However, only eight were charged
7
At present, the focus has broadened to include women from Russia, the NIS and Eastern Europe being
‘trafficked’ to Western Europe and the United States (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997). There is also increasing
concern about inter-regional ‘traffic’ for example from Nepal to India (Human Rights Watch 1995),, and Burma
to Thailand (Human Rights Watch 1995), and rural to urban trafficking within one country (Wijers and Lap-Chew
1997).
10
with white slavery. An analysis of these and other statistics of the time leads him to observe
that:
the virgin abducted against her will or the woman raped and transported either by
force or by deception to a far-off brothel was a rare exception. Of course, the
commission of inquiry and the abolitionist societies proved the existence of such
incidents, but the trafficking in women, whether on a large or small scale, concerned
almost exclusively girls and women who were well aware of what was expected of
them and who, without compulsion, were willing to be sent abroad (p. 285).
He concludes that 'the statistics undermine the myth of an international white slave trade
involving violence against innocent virgins' (p. 296). Gibson, in her study of white slavery
campaigns in France, uses police statistics to back up her claim that 'proof of widespread
trafficking in women against their will is lacking…the reality of white slavery never approached
its notoriety' (1986: 83). Even Rosen (1982), who of all historians studied, is most concerned
with proving the existence of a white slave trade, concludes that white slavery accounted for
no more than 10% of all prostitution. In general, historians concur that while white slavery did
exist, its incidence was greatly exaggerated.
If the data shows so little white slavery, where did the huge numbers quoted by anti-white
slavery campaigners come from? Sometimes these numbers were purposefully misrepresented
by campaigners eager to show the severity of their cause. Guy (1991) discovered that statistics
relating to the numbers of foreign prostitutes in Buenos Aires were taken to prove the
existence of large-scale international white slavery. Connelly (1990) traces the ways in which
statistics and findings of the Chicago Vice Commission report of 1911 were used by all
subsequently published white-slavery narratives in America in a way that was, 'provocative,
lurid, emotionally overwrought, and misleading' (Connelly 1980: 119).8
Even a cursory comparison of the white slavery era to today throws up a number of
similarities. Then as now, feminists were heavily involved in the campaigns, often in coalition
with those who would otherwise be antithetical to feminist goals. The wide extent of the panic
8
He gives the example of how the report's estimate of a total of 5,000 prostitutes 'at any one time' in the city of
Chicago was transformed by one such narrative into: 'Each year Chicago alone exacts the ghastly toll of five
thousand (see Report of Chicago Vice Commission) of these girls to fill the decaying gaps of our great army of
twenty-five thousand lost women' (Connelly 1980: 120).
11
is similar, the sheer numbers of people involved, the resources dedicated to its eradication, its
extensive coverage in the media and national and international legal changes (see Chapkis
1997). And there are also similarities in the way the ‘story’ of trafficking is told. Yet very few
contemporary accounts of trafficking make mention of white slavery, or do so only in passing.
If mentioned, it is generally with a sense that trafficking had actually occurred in history,
though it was called white slavery. Thus the comparison is to presumed actual events. Some
accounts, such as Chapkis (1997), go further, recognising the parallels between representations
of prostitutes in white slavery accounts and in trafficking.
Today’s stereotypical ‘trafficking victim’ bears as little resemblance to women migrating for
work in the sex industry as did her historical counterpart, the white slave. The increase in
female migration, including migration for sex work, over the last decade, is in part due to
women seeking increased autonomy and economic independence (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997,
Kempadoo 1998, Watenabe 1998). For some third world/ ‘non-western’ women, temporary
work in the sex industry in another country is one of a number of livelihood strategies
(Kempadoo 1998). The majority of ‘trafficking victims’ are aware that the jobs offered them
are in the sex industry, but are misled about the conditions under which they will work (Wijers
and Lap-Chew 1997). Yet, policies to eradicate trafficking and re-integrate victims into society
continue to be based on the notion of the ‘innocent’, unwilling victim. They often combine
efforts designed to protect ‘innocent’ women with those designed to punish ‘bad’ women: i.e.
prostitutes (Doezema 1998).
If the issue of women being trafficked into prostitution has thus resurfaced as a matter of
international concern after remaining dormant for nearly eighty years, what can be learned
from tracing debates back over time? What light could be shed on contemporary debates
around trafficking if we look at the ways in which positions on prostitution have been
developed and articulated over time? In such a process, parallels between discourses on ‘white
slavery’ and ‘trafficking in women’ become even more evident. In the discussion that follows, I
look first at the different positions taken up in ‘white slavery’ debates, then turn to look at
antecedents and at current positions taken in competing approaches to the ‘problem of
trafficking’.
12
Abolitionism and regulationism
As in the current ‘crisis’ of trafficking, people of widely disparate occupations, values and
political convictions found in white slavery a cause that brought them together in unlikely
coalitions. In a similar fashion to today, ideological differences between the different groups
engaged in attempts to combat white slavery concerned consent. Many campaigners against the
white slave trade saw all prostitutes as victims in need of rescue; others argued the importance
of distinguishing the willing prostitute from the victimised white slave. The distinction between
white slavery and prostitution was maintained by campaigners of differing ideological bent.
One group were the so-called purity campaigners, who aimed to rid society of ‘vice’, focusing
in particular on youthful sexuality. For example, the US District Attorney Edwin W. Sims
wrote in the preface to the influential 1910 tract, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or War on the
White Slave Trade,
The characteristic which distinguishes the white slave traffic from immorality
[prostitution] in general is that the women who are the victims of the traffic are forced
unwillingly to live an immoral life. The term “white slave” includes only those women
and girls who are actually slaves (Sims 1910a: 14).
Purity reformers’ relationship with the prostitute herself was ambiguous: while professing
sympathy for the lost innocents sacrificed by white slavers, they were severe in their judgement
of girls and women whose immodest behaviour led them into a life of shame. Most purity
reformers espoused an approach to prostitution that has been termed 'prohibitionist'.
Prohibitionist systems of regulating prostitution make the act of prostitution itself illegal, with
prostitutes and procurers alike subject to arrest. As Gibson remarks of the Catholic Churchinfluenced prohibitionist campaign in Italy: ‘Thus a number of prohibitionists joined the white
slave campaign to advance their own final aim, ridding the world of prostitution, by punishing
the malicious procurers and redeeming the sinning women’ (1986: 72).
Another approach was advocated by regulationists, who believed that the necessary evil of
prostitution should be controlled by stringent state regulations. Dr. Parent-Duchatelet, whose
1836 study of French prostitutes was a model for regulationists, wrote: ‘Prostitutes are as
inevitable in a great conurbation as sewers, cesspits and refuse dumps. The conduct of the
authorities should be the same with regard to each' (quoted in N. Roberts 1992: 223).
Harnessing rational scientific arguments to moral disapproval, regulationists argued that state
13
regulation was the only way to control venereal disease. Innocent women and girls needed
protection from immorality; however, once fallen, it was society that needed protecting from
the immoral woman. The best way to protect society, argued regulationists, was to register and
medically control prostitutes.9
Other campaigners, particularly proto-feminist activists, made little distinction between white
slavery and prostitution itself. These early feminists attempts to break down the distinction
between innocent victims and immoral prostitutes started with Josephine Butler’s campaign
against the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts in England and
Wales.10 Under these Acts, any woman who was suspected of prostitution could be detained
by the police and forced to undergo an internal examination. Butler and other abolitionists
argued that men were responsible for prostitution, placing the blame for prostitution squarely
on the shoulders of unbridled male lust. No women could be said to truly consent to
prostitution: if a woman appeared willing, this was merely the result of the power that men
held over her. By turning all prostitutes into victims, Butlerite feminists undercut the rational
for regulationist systems.
When the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1886, Butler and her followers turned
their attention to the fight against white slavery. In the abolitionist vision, prostitution and
white slavery would come to an end if laws targeted those who made money from prostitutes,
rather than the prostitute herself. No woman would enter prostitution of her own accord, they
reasoned, with no one to lure or deceive her, woman's innate moral superiority would ensure
her purity. In this, feminist abolitions shared a view of women's sexuality that was common to
all the various anti-white slavery campaigners. Women were considered sexually passive, which
made them more 'virtuous' then men, but, paradoxically, once that virtue was 'lost' through
illicit sexual behaviour, women's sexual nature became dangerous. Consequently, calls for the
need to protect women's purity alternated with attempts to reform and discipline prostitutes.
Abolitionist feminism spread to Continental Europe and the US: ‘The image of the victim of
9
France was the European pioneer of regulationist systems, exhaustively detailed by Corbin (1990). Supported by
doctors in other European countries and America, regulationists joined the international movement against white
slavery in order to advance state regulation of prostitution.
10 Walkowitz (1980) has written the classic feminist text on Butlerite feminism and the CD Acts. This paragraph
is based on her work.
14
white slavery being that of a young and innocent girl, women of all ideologies could agree that
she deserved defense, both from the trafficker and from her own unnatural desires’ (Gibson
1986: 74).
Liberalism, feminism, sex
Just as feminists in early 20th century Europe and the US articulated dissatisfaction with their
position under liberalism through the trope of prostitution (Chapkis 1997; Doezema 2001;
Haag 1999), second-wave western feminists too grappled over the issues of prostitution and
pornography. Yet while feminists in America and Europe were staging ‘take back the night’
marches through red-light districts, sex workers began forming their own organisations,
demanding that prostitution and other related types of activities-exotic dancing, porn acting
and modeling, be recognised as work. Accounts of the western sex worker rights movement
site the formation of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in 1973 in California and the
sex workers strike and occupation of a church in Lyon in 1975 as key moments in the start of
the sex worker rights movement. These groups and activities were followed by many similar
ones throughout the 70s and 80s, with the formation of groups such as PCV in Australia, and
the Red Thread in the Netherlands. Nor was this organising limited to Europe and America; as
Kempadoo and I document (1998), sex worker organising throughout the ‘third world’ has a
long history and active present, though it is often ignored by Western accounts of ‘the sex
worker rights movement’.
Feminism in the West has tended to see women’s oppression through the lens of liberalism, in
which ‘violence’ – in particular sexual violence – came to be seen, as Haag puts it, as ‘ ‘the
core’ of women’s oppression…by denying women ‘ownership’ of their bodies’ (1999: xiii). In
liberal terms, ‘liberation’ for women meant asserting women’s status as individuals and as
owners of their own bodies. In the tradition of feminists such as Carole Pateman (1988),
(whom Haag explicitly follows), Haag sets out to question the legacy of liberalism for
feminism, in particular, liberalism’s relationship to sexuality. Pateman famously put the liberal
legacy in question by identifying the ‘contract’ – liberalism’s political centre – as the source of
women’s oppression, rather than the site of their potential freedom. Pateman argues that
liberalism works to hide the operations of sexual power. For Pateman, the notion of
15
prostitution as a ‘consensual’ relationship is an example of how women’s subordination is
constructed as ‘freedom’ under the liberal contract.
Haag chooses as her focal point ‘a historical analysis of the ideas of consent and coercion, a
‘presuppositional opposition’ by which rights and sexual personality are governed in American
culture’ (p. xiii). While Haag’s concern is with the American genealogy of consent, the language
of choice and rights reaches far beyond American shores. Liberalism’s legacy for feminism is
global: as the notion of human rights has expanded and become legitimate and powerful arena
to argue for liberatory ideals around gender, sexuality, and a host of other concerns, global
feminism has been largely constructed in liberal arguments, as these fit into a human rights
framework. This has not gone uncontested, with powerful critiques of the western liberal
feminism emerging from post-colonial feminists (e.g. Spivak 1988; Mohanty 1988). Yet in the
international policy arena, human rights is the most prevalent discourse for articulating
struggles around oppression and freedom. Feminists have relied on liberal precepts to argue
their cases in the international sphere , with ‘choice’ and ‘coercion’ framing questions about
reproductive rights and health.
Contextualising Consent: The Forced/Voluntary Dichotomy
The history of sex worker rights organising did not develop in opposition to feminism. A
number of sex worker organisations, such as the Red Thread in the Netherlands, receive active
support from feminist organisations. Many sex worker activists have been schooled in the
feminist tradition (Delacoste and Alexander, 1987; Nagle 1997). A glance through the ‘cannon’
(Kempadoo 1998) of the sex worker rights movement in the west shows the embeddedness,
both in terms of ‘thought’ and of persons, of sex worker rights in feminism. These texts, such
as the World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR 1985), Phetersons’s The Whore Stigma (1986),
Alexander and Delacoste’s Sex Work (1992) and Nagle's Whores and Other Feminists (1997) seek
to analyse and defend sex work in feminist terms, in conversation with prominent antiprostitution feminists such Sheila Jeffries (1997), Catherine Mackinnon (1987; 1989) and
Kathleen Barry.11
11
Feminism is not the only discourse with influence on sex worker rights discourses: gay rights, queer politics,
human rights discourses, and medical discourses have also been variously influential.
16
Central to this, often bitter, conversation between sex worker rights advocates and antiprostitution feminists has been the notion of consent. Haag writes:
Because the stakes are so high for women in their daily lives, feminists for decades
have tried to nail down and specify what violence is. The strategy has been to position
a definition of violence beyond the vagaries of interpretation, where historically
women’s injuries and accounts of sexual violation often have been derided and
systematically represented as indications of the woman’s own sexual licentiousness. In
such an environment it is only logical that feminism seeks after essences,
unconditional properties, of ‘consent’, or of violence, so that these cannot be
misinterpreted or talked out of view (1999: xv).
Abolitionist feminism remains a potent force in the campaign against trafficking in women.
Like their foremothers, contemporary ‘neo-abolitionist’ feminists deny that prostitution can be
considered a true choice or legitimate enaction of the will (e.g. Barry 1995, Raymond 1998).
Because all prostitution is inherently violence against women, they argue, no true consent is
possible. Regulationist arguments are also very much alive today – indeed, with Aids,
regulationism has regained the ground that it had lost to prohibitionist and abolitionist
arguments. Sex workers have argued that what is needed is a fourth type of state policy
approach to prostitution; distinct from abolition, prohibition and regulation. The approach
advocated is 'decriminalisation’ – that is, that all aspects of the sex industry be taken out of the
criminal code – including both laws supposedly designed to protect sex workers by
criminalizing 'pimps and procurers' and those intended to control prostitutes, such as
mandatory health checks.12 This position, articulated in the 1986 International Charter for
Prostitutes Rights (ICPR 1985), entwines its views on labour with those on consent to sex and
consent to work.13 The Charter declares:
12
Though these four distinctions are commonly used when referring to prostitution policy, they are ‘ideal types’,
with most existing state policies showing a combination of approaches (West 2000). West notes that this
characterisation is:'increasingly inappropriate as a description of current developments. A nation-state’s measures
with regard to prostitution are far from internally homogeneous and may include elements of more than one
regulatory framework. There is movement between each regime, reflecting the political influence of competing
discourses and organised interests' (p.106). West looks in particular at the political influence of sex worker rights
discourses in the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. Her analysis shows the ways in which a pure
‘decriminalist’ position, is, in practice, modified by sex worker organisations. The usefulness of the term
'decriminalisation' is also waning because the neo-abolitionist feminists have adopted it to refer to their own
policy position; that prostitutes themselves should be decriminalised, but clients, brothel owners and other third
parties should be criminalised.
13 Adopted at the Second International Whore’s Conference, Brussels 1985. See Pheterson (1989) for an account
of the conference.
17
Decriminalize all aspects of adult prostitution resulting from individual decision.
Decriminalize prostitution and regulate third parties according to standard business
codes…Prostitutes should have the freedom to choose their place of work and
residence.
In this view of prostitution, adults are capable of consenting to sex and thus to sex work,
children cannot. The Charter thus calls for:
Employment, counselling, legal, and housing services for runaway children should be
funded in order to prevent child prostitution and to promote child well-being and
opportunity (ICPR 1985).
While the Charter is now nearly twenty years old, and repeated calls have been voiced from to
update it, its principles it are still widely accepted by sex worker rights supporters and
organisations (Nagle 1997; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). For example, the DMSC Calcutta,
one of the worlds largest sex worker rights organisations, wrote in a recent position paper,
DMSC sees sex work as a contractual service, negotiated between consenting adults.
In such a service contract there ought to be no coercion or deception. As a sex
workers’ rights organisation, DMSC is against any force exercised against sex workers,
be it by the client, brothel keepers, room owners, pimps, police, or traffickers (Jana et
al. 2002: 75).
Many sex worker rights groups call for recognition as unions, such as AMBAR in Venezuela.
Others have been successful in gaining local union recognition of sex work as labour, including
the UK-based International Union of Sex Workers (www.iusw.org), and the Exotic Dancers
Alliance in the United States (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).
This adoption of the forced/voluntary framework shows the close links between sex worker
rights politics/activism and feminism, for this distinction was an attempt to keep true to the
feminist strategy of taking up ‘violence against women’ as a way of furthering a feminist
agenda. ‘Voluntary vs. forced prostitution’ was not a rejection of the feminist conception of
prostitution but a refinement of it. As a conceptual framework for understanding sex work, the
‘voluntary/forced’ model, with ‘consent’ operating as the hinge between coercion and choice,
had (has) a number of distinct advantages. As ‘consent’ had become the standard by which
heterosexual sexual behaviour had come to be determined as harmful or not, as illustrated by
the ‘brilliant literalism’ of the feminist slogan ‘no means no’ (Haag 1999), sex worker rights
activists and theorists were taking familiar concepts and applying them in unfamiliar territory.
Combined with the ‘pro-choice’ abortion rhetoric, familiar to a generation of feminists, sex
workers and their feminist supporters were able to carve out a space in which certain sex
18
workers could convincingly argue, using acceptable liberal feminist terms, for recognition of
their liberal rights – as well as create a space for the ‘forced’ prostitute, denied her liberal right
to ‘free choice’ of sexual contact and labour.
However, the implicit distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution, based on consent,
raises a number of disturbing questions. These questionings mark the beginning of my
involvement with the politics of 'anti-trafficking' , which started me on the trajectory that led
to this current research. The relationship between feminism and the politics of sex worker
rights is a very personal one for me, as a sex worker and a feminist. I began my career in sex
work in Amsterdam in 1989, and as a good young feminist, I headed straight down to the Red
Thread, the Dutch prostitutes’ rights organisation, almost as soon a I started work in the
brothel. The Red Thread was very strongly rooted in a liberal feminist vision of women’s
sexuality and autonomy: in short, that the stigma and discrimination that society meted out to
sex workers was a way of controlling the sexuality of all women. This feminist vision
supported sex workers in their struggle for recognition as workers and for respect for their
human rights.
Through working with the Red Thread I became involved in international activism, meeting
sex worker activists from around the globe at international conferences, such as the
International Conferences on AIDS. I became active in the International Committee for
Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR) and then its successor, the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP),
where I have been a board member for mobility issues since May 2002. My involvement in
international activism was the motivation for me to begin studying at university level, for I felt
that an understanding of international politics was essential to building a global movement of
sex workers. Involvement in international activism brought me into contact with the antitrafficking movement. The subjects of rights for sex workers, and the impact of anti-trafficking
campaigns on them, have formed the core of my academic and activist interests for the past
fourteen years. Over this time, I have met hundreds of sex workers and sex worker activists
from around the globe. I have participated in academic and activist debates on sex work and
trafficking; have conducted research; and published writings. The book I edited with Kamala
Kempadoo, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition (1998), grew out of my
19
experiences with the NSWP, and many of the contributions are from friends and colleagues
involved in the NSWP.
Working at the United Nations
My contact with sex workers and my experiences as a sex worker allow a constant checking of
academic and political ideas with what is happening ‘on the ground’. This was brought home
to me forcefully when writing up this thesis, as I began doing sex work in a local brothel. In
the course of working there, I have met sex workers from Russia, Thailand, Germany, Albania,
Columbia, Cypress, Brazil, Hungary, Lithuania, England, and the United States. One of our
customers came to refer to us as ‘The United Nations’. As a sex worker, activist and academic,
I have thus been able to approach this research from the ‘inside’ as well as the ‘outside’; as a
‘participant observer’ at two ‘United Nations’: as a sex worker in the brothel, and as an NGO
representative at the United Nations in Vienna around the negotiations for the 2000 UN
Trafficking Protocol. My academic involvement in the debates around sex work and
trafficking, my activism, and my own experiences of sex work provide the opportunity and
also the necessity for continual reflexivity. This reflexivity is a two-way process, as my
experiences as a sex worker necessitate continual revision of the ideas in this research, and as
my research and activism shed new light on my experiences and on the way I think about the
experiences I hear of from other sex workers.
Working in the brothel made clear to me once again the mismatch between the media and the
feminist perceptions of migrant sex workers and my own experiences and those of my coworkers. In the smoky brothel living room, waiting between customers, while putting on
makeup, texting, reading, and watching television, we talk. Talking to the other women in the
brothel reinforces the commonalities between my experiences and theirs, belying a simple
distinction between sex workers from the ‘West’ and the ‘rest of the world’. My experiences of
sex work have also been bound up with movement, mobility, migration, and the ‘search for a
better life’. Kim, Tammi, Wendy, Julia, Becky, Tracy and the others tell stories of their lives
that evidence their courage and resourcefulness in getting to England and of their skillfulness
20
in ‘working the system’, even those who have incurred substantial debt to work here, or been
deported from countries all over Europe.14
I would like to tell a story that shows the ways in which the spaces – both literal and figurative
– that I occupy as a sex worker, activist, and academic have worked together to inform this
research. It also illuminates the ways in which my multiple occupations motivate my
opposition to the abolitionist feminist position. The story begins in my living room, with an
article I read last week in the UK Guardian (15-05-04), in which neo-abolitionist feminist Julie
Bindel of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University
reports on prostitution policy in Europe, including trafficking policy (Bindel 2004). I have had
a number of discussions with Julie over the years about our respective approaches to
trafficking and prostitution. Like other abolitionist feminists, she advocates greater police
control over the industry, with the aim of the elimination of prostitution altogether. Her article
favorably recounts the opinion of former London vice unit chief Paul Holmes, ‘How are we
supposed to know where the trafficked women are, and the kids, if we don’t monitor
it?’(quoted in Bindel 2004: 55).
The story moves back in time a few years, to another location, a conference where I heard the
same sentiments from Paul Holmes when I asked him about reports I had heard from sex
workers and social workers in London: reports that police were going to brothels, asking to see
passports, and taking away ‘illegal’ workers on the spot to consequently deport them. This
conference was held to mark the publication of the 2000 UK Home-Office commissioned
report into UK trafficking (Kelly and Regan 2000), carried out by Liz Kelly and Linda Regan
of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, where Julie Bindel also works.15 In addition to
recounting stereotypical trafficking narratives, the report called for nation-wide adoption of the
so-called ‘pro-active’ approach of London police towards trafficking. The story also takes place
in the academe, as I was contacted at IDS, on the basis of my published research, by BBC
14
I have chosen pseudonyms that reflect the ‘working names’ used by myself and my co-workers. Most women
choose ‘English’ or ‘European’ names that won’t alert the police to the possible presence of non-British workers,
as the police call the brothel pretending to be customers and ask for the names and nationalities of the women
working that day. Similarly, all the women tell customers that they are from EU countries, for example Brazilian
workers say they are from Portugal.
15 Worlds Apart: Trafficking Women into Britain, July 6, 2000, London.
21
Radio Four and asked to take part in a Women’s Hour discussion of the report with Liz, which
I did. In yet another switch of space, this report also inspired an activist response, as I helped
mobilise sex worker rights supporters to attend the conference to protest and to respond to
the raft of ‘sex slave’ stories the report inspired in the media.
The story now moves ahead in time and into the brothel. Shortly before I began working
there, in September 2004, the brothel was held up by three men with knives. I couldn’t believe
my ears when tiny Angie, the receptionist, though nearly sixty, told me how she had not only
held off the robbers, but chased them down the street while Tracy called the police. Improved
security at the brothel, including CTV at the street entrance and in the hallway and a system of
double-locking doors, was one result of the attempted robbery. Another was the arrest of the
perpetrators; largely due to the actions of brothel staff. Everyone was very satisfied with the
police response; they took the matter seriously and treated all the women with respect.
A few weeks later, after I had started work there, but not while I was present, the police came
on another matter. In the spirit of ‘pro-active’ policing, they had come asking for passports.
When I came in the next day, my colleagues told me how Polly and Susie were hauled away in
their work clothing, without being able to take any of their belongings. Kim was crying as she
told me the story, she was very close to Polly and was extremely worried about what had
happened to her. We still don’t know what happened to Polly. Susie sent us an email, telling us
that she had been taken to the police cells, held for a few days and then deported to Thailand.
Then, one evening when I was working, the police visited again. They were from the unit
investigating the attempted robbery, and had come to take another statement from Susie.
When we told them that their colleagues had deported their star witness a week before, they
looked wearily resigned. It was nothing new to them, they were well aware of the irony of the
situation. For me, immersed for years in the reality of sex work and the political play of
meaning around trafficking, the irony was intensified: effective action against the actual threat
of violence to me and my co-workers was being blocked by the sort of action that many
22
feminists support in the name of stopping ‘trafficking’.16 But for Susie, the irony may prove
perilous, as she owed money to those who arranged her trip to the UK. Reports by antitrafficking organisations such as GAATW (1997) show that workers who are deported before
they get the chance to pay off their debt are at high risk from being ‘re-trafficked’ and then are
faced with double the amount to pay back. The very situations that abolitionist anti-trafficking
feminists hope to prevent by encouraging ‘pro-active’ policing thus actually work to perpetuate
them.
I now have Susie’s locker. As I emptied it of her shoes, condoms, shampoo, and make-up, I
felt a familiar wave of despair and anger at the misguided attitudes of well-meaning feminists
who actively support these types of police actions. I would like to think that if only there was
some way that they could know what I know, see what I see, they would re-think the wisdom
of increasing police power over sex workers in the name of stopping trafficking. The catch is
of course that there is no way for them to know as I do: even if they were to spend time in the
brothel with us, sit with us, they would not hear the stories we tell each other. But I won’t end
the story without hope: it continues with me, a sex worker, sitting at my desk writing this
thesis, in the hopes that it will further my activist desires.
Abolitionism and Regulationism Reconfigured
Neo-abolitionist feminists, such as CATW, reject the distinction between forced and voluntary
prostitution. Not only do they deny that it is possible to ‘choose’ prostitution, they argue that
the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution means that prostitution policy
reinforce traditional distinctions between ‘innocent’ women and ‘guilty’ prostitutes (Barry
1990). As both historical and contemporary accounts have demonstrated, abolitionist laws –
those which ostensibly protect the prostitute by making only those who profit from her or
16Violent
robbery is the most serious threat to personal safety faced by indoor sex workers in the UK, much
greater than the threat of sexual violence, according to a review of studies of violence against UK sex workers by
Hilary Kinnell of the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (2001). Kinnell clearly identifies how sex workers’ fear
of police works to allow this violence to continue:
The perpetrators of these ‘property motivated’ attacks have clearly identified sex flats and brothels as
premises where considerable amounts of cash are to be found – far more than will be carried by a lone
street worker who does business for a fraction of what is charged indoors. They may also be aware that
indoor sex workers will often be unwilling to report robberies to the police, as they do not wish to draw
the attention of police to premises used for sex work (Kinnell 2001: 6).
Sex workers’ reluctance to report violence only increases with fear of arrest and deportation, a point that is
central to the position of anti-trafficking organisations such as GAATW.
23
force her: the 'pimps' 'procurers', 'traffickers', and now, even clients – are used instead against
sex workers and their families (Bindman and Doezema 1997). 17 Despite these repressive
effects, neo-abolitionist feminists continue to argue for these policies. In the face of the
overwhelming evidence of the use of these laws against sex workers, it is difficult to take the
neo-abolitionist claim to want to help prostitutes as completely transparent.18 As with their
abolitionist fore-mothers, the desire to help the unwilling and abused is mixed with a
maternalist desire to discipline the naughty girls who refuse to acknowledge their victimhood
(Doezema 2001).19
Yet, sex worker rights movements and supporters – including myself – can perhaps be accused
of the same willful blindness when it comes to the policy implications of our position. When
policies are adopted – by states, NGOS, or international bodies – that recognise the difference
between forced and voluntary prostitution, their implementation, if not their intent, has been
to lend support to regulationist effects. While the contemporary wave of worldwide sexworker activism, which began in the mid-1970s (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998), was
influenced by feminism, the advent of Aids and gay activism meant that, in the words of
NSWP founder Cheryl Overs, sex worker rights 'found a new political family' (Overs 1998).
And 'the Aids world', dominated as it is by medical discourses – the home of regulationism –
has proved itself a more nurturing environment for sex worker rights movements, both in
terms of resources and in terms of political support, than the feminist/women's human rights
world. However, this support has been by no means consistent or whole-hearted.
17
The inclusion of clients in the list of those punishable by law was first adopted by Sweden in 1998. Neoabolitionist feminists claim that this marks a radical departure from the old system, doing away with the 'gender
bias' of laws that target only the female prostitute, not the male client. This is of course true, but it does so at the
expense of the sex worker her (or him) self. While a full study on the effects of the law on sex workers has yet to
be done, preliminary studies indicate that rather than stopping work, sex workers have retreated to less visible
forms of work. As with any disciplinary measure, it is the most vulnerable and visible sex workers – those working
on the street – who are most effected by the loss of clients and loss of income. See Kulick (2002), Gould (2001)
and Kilvington et.al. (2001) for examinations of the feminist campaign around the law and of the law’s affects on
sex workers.
18 Abolitionist and prohibitionist positions have similar political effects, despite their very different underlying
views on the meaning of consent and the role of the state in regulating consent.
19 The history of feminist political activism is so entwined with this desire to discipline the unruly young women.
It is astounding, and cause for deep concern that this is still the case.
24
While paying lip-service to the need to empower sex workers for effective HIV prevention,
Aids organisations are too often guilty of keeping sex workers out of decisions made on their
behalf, and of implementing or supporting government programmes which are actually
regulationism by the back door (Overs, Doezema and Shivdas 2002). A notorious example of
regulation and repression in the name of ‘empowerment’ are the so-called ‘100% Condom
Programmes’ first instituted in Thailand in the late 1990s. These programmes give the police
increased powers over sex workers, and often involve forcible testing of sex workers for STDs
and public identification of sex workers found to be infected. The WHO has recommended
that these programmes be adopted throughout Asia, despite the vociferous objections of
regional sex worker organisations. The NSWP is running an international campaign
documenting and denouncing abuses connected to these programmes.20
Consensual dilemmas
The conundrum of the ‘free/forced’ dichotomy – of consent as envisioned in relation to
prostitution - has been the most compelling and persistent one for me as an activist and
academic, one that I return to again and again in my work: the ‘choice’ question in writings and
debates about prostitution just will not go away.21 It is endlessly frustrating as an ‘out’ sex
worker to be asked by every journalist or seminar attendee, ‘but did you really choose to be a
prostitute’? Or, to face the same question about sex workers who are perceived to be different
than I am ‘But can you say that third world (or poor, or underage) women also choose to be
prostitutes?’22 In 1993, while wanting to get away from the choice issue altogether, I still was
looking for answers in a more nuanced vision of ‘choice’. I articulated this in an interview with
Wendy Chapkis: ‘The idea that there are two distinct poles of “forced” and “free” is a false
dichotomy. I mean who really freely chooses to work at any kind of job? I want to get the
whole choice argument off the prostitutes’ political agenda. We’ll never win it and it’s useless
20
For details, see the NSWP website at www.nswp.org.
‘Why did you become a prostitute?’ has been a staple question on surveys of prostitutes since the dawn of
social science. Indeed, prostitutes were among the first groups to be subjected to this new means of ‘bio-power’
– see S. Bell 1994. And, since the earliest surveys, the answers have remained remarkably consistent – see
Pheterson (1990).
22 The question about whether or not adult men ‘choose’ to be prostitutes comes, of course, much less often, as
most feminists have always considered male sex workers to be such a minor phenomenon that it in no way
effected their view of the sex industries as the prime example of women’s oppression by men. This is changing,
with recent studies looking at ‘female sex tourism’(Sanchez-Taylor 2001; Phillips 1998) Many of these, however,
victimise male sex workers as the latest casualty of the world’s unequal distribution of wealth, without considering
how ‘adding men’ to the analysis might effect their overall view of the issue of consent in the sex industry.
21
25
as a political strategy’ (quoted in Chapkis 1997: 52). Chapkis herself follows with an expression
of the most familiar strategy used by sex worker rights supporters when faced, yet again, with
the ‘choice’ question: ‘Very few women’s lives are models of “free choice” Most women’s
“choices” are severely limited by their disadvantaged position within hierarchical structures of
sex race, and class.’23
The feeling that this ‘modified choice’ argument was not really sufficient nagged at me even
then. My wrestling with the relationship between choice and prostitution has been a series of
confusion, progression, doubt, and moments of clarity. One of these moments of clarity came
out of one of my earliest encounters with the anti-trafficking movement, at a conference in the
Netherlands in1994.24 Without wishing to over-dramatise, I had an ‘epiphany’: a realisation
that came to me with great force and clarity. I realised that in order to effectively combat the
neo-abolitionist position that choice to sex work was impossible, sex worker politics would
have to move to neo-abolitionist ground. What do I mean by ‘move to the neo-abolitionist
ground’? Though I didn’t know the term for it then, what I realised in Utrecht was that the
problem of choice was an epistemological one. For neo-abolitionists, sex work is per se a
human rights abuse, and thus choice is negated. It is not so much that they deny that choice
was possible, it was just that choice does not matter when it came to prostitution. In the neoabolitionist prostitution epistemology, ‘choice’ is irrelevant. In the context of this framework,
to argue that prostitution is a legitimate profession because some women and men choose it is
completely useless. It in no way challenges the foundations of the neo-abolitionist position – it
is like using a vacuum cleaner to mow the lawn.
Radical feminist analysis locates the source of the illegitimacy of ‘consent’ in the construction
of sexual relations of power: prostitution is seen as ‘sexual exploitation’. Kathleen Barry,
founder of the neo-abolitionist Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, sees women’s
subordination as the result of sex. Sex is defined as ‘the condition of subordination of women
that is both bodied in femaleness and enacted in sexual experience’ (Barry 1995: 278).
23
In the same work Chapkis (1997) makes an exiting challenge to the neo-abolitionist view of prostitution. After
reviewing at length the neo-abolitionist arguments that prostitution destroys the prostitute, Chapkis argues for a
reconsideration of the role of emotions in labour and in particular in prostitution, calling for prostitution to be
viewed as ‘emotional labour’.
24 International Conference on Trafficking in Persons, November 14-16, Utrecht, the Netherlands
26
Women’s subordination is seen as analogous to that of class subordination, that is, women’s
‘class position’ is one of sexual subordination to the dominant 'class' of men. The ‘injury’ of
sex is thus that which constitutes the ‘class’ of women. For Barry, as well as other feminists
such as Sheila Jeffries (1997), and Catherine MacKinnon (1987, 1989), sex is power: male
power over women. Barry sees prostitution as the ultimate expression of male dominance.
My study of sex as power…inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me to
prostitution. …one cannot mobilize against a class condition of oppression unless one
knows its fullest dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and expose sexual
power in its most severe, global, institutionalized, and crystallized forms…Prostitution
– the cornerstone of all sexual exploitation (1995: 9).
Other feminist approaches broaden the scope beyond sexual power relationships, and
incorporate analyses of the effects of economic, racial and military aspects power relations, as
well as sexuality, on prostitution and its organisation in diverse settings (Troung 1990;
Kempadoo 1999; Leam Lim 1998; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1992; Enloe 1989; Moon 1997).
While these take in the wider realm of globalised power relations, for most feminist research,
as West and Austrin (2002) point out, the problematic locus of power remains the prostituteclient relationship. O’Connell Davidson (1998) argues that the radical feminist conception of
consent is dangerous because it implies that prostitution is the same as rape. Nonetheless,
though supportive of sex worker calls for decriminalisation, O’Connell Davidson concludes
that while prostitution is different from rape, consent in prostitution will always only be a
‘sheen’ of consent. For O’Connell Davidson, this remains the case even though prostitutes
themselves may subjectively experience the relationship as consensual. True consent, she
argues, is impossible, given the relative positions that the sex worker and client occupy in the
intimate encounter – positions structured by economic, gendered, sexualised and racialised
power dynamics.
Sullivan (2000) argues that O’Connell Davidson relies on a liberal notion of consent, in which
the only ‘real’ consent is seen to exist in the absence of power relations. While I believe
O’Connell Davidson’s argument takes a more sophisticated and contextualised approach to
consent than this suggests, I agree with Sullivan that O’Connell Davidson’s analysis is
implicitly contingent on an abstract standard of consent in the absence of power-differences;
against which actually occurring sexual relationships are measured. Sullivan argues that because
27
sex always takes place in existing power relationships, feminists’ attention should go towards
finding ways to help sex workers maximize their power, particularly by improving their
working conditions. West and Austrin’s (2002) analysis locates sex work, as ‘mainstream’ work,
on a broader canvas and their analysis moves away from the more restricted vision of those
who focus only on the intimate sphere to explore how prostitution is ‘produced as work’. They
contend that an analysis of sex work as work ‘requires replacing the emphasis on worker-client
encounters with analysis of the ways in which variable network ties and specific discourses of
sexuality are mobilised in and constitute particular settings’ (2002: 499). Their discussion of
O’Connell Davidson’s work articulates the shortcomings of the narrow focus on sex workerclient interactions, in which the power of third parties such as the police and the state is barely
interrogated. This is an essential argument: one of the key differences between most feminist
analysis and the that of sex worker organisations concerns precisely this. Sex worker activists
place most emphasis on their struggles against the police and the state, rather than against
clients. This is one of the major reasons that sex worker activists are reluctant to join feminists
effort to ‘stop trafficking’, as this is seen to entail increasing the power of the state over the sex
industry. This is explored in detail in Chapters Six and Seven.
Despite these more nuanced approaches to prostitution as work and the role of consent in the
construction of prostitution, the political debate on prostitution and trafficking is largely
polarised between the absolute impossibility of choice and the distinction between ‘forced’ and
‘voluntary’ prostitution. This was shown in the debates on the 2000 Trafficking Protocol in
Vienna, where states and feminists placed themselves on either side of this divide.
Rights for sex workers and help for victims of forced trafficking: Sex worker rights
movements and anti-trafficking politics
At the time that I attended the Utrecht conference, the sex worker rights movements had not
much engaged with the trafficking movements, even with those, such as the Dutch Foundation
Against Trafficking in Women (STV), who were supportive of the aims of sex worker rights.
The free/forced distinction had led to a tacit division of tasks between NGOs in the
Netherlands, and in many other countries. Sex worker rights organisations were there to fight
for rights for ‘voluntary’ prostitutes, while organisations such as STV were there to help the
victims of ‘forced prostitution/trafficking’. At the time I began to be involved in the anti-
28
trafficking debates, most of the attention of sex worker rights movements were still firmly on
Aids. I began to get involved in the trafficking debates, because I saw that this was where the
neo-abolitionist organisations, such as CATW, were concentrating much of their energies. It
became apparent that despite the fact that organisations such as STV/GAATW took an
opposing stance on how trafficking should be defined (as outlined above), there was still noone who was defending the rights of ‘voluntary’ sex workers. At this time, the anti-trafficking
movement was growing in importance internationally, and both of the international networks
(GAATW and CATW) had focused their attentions on campaigning and lobbying at the 1995
UN Beijing Women’s meeting and the accompanying NGO conference.
I argued in an earlier publication that sprang directly out of my concerns at this time
(Doezema 1998) that the anti-trafficking movement was dangerous to sex worker rights goals
in both of its global feminist incarnations (CATW and GAATW). Obviously, the neoabolitionist anti-trafficking position was axiomatically opposed to the idea of sex work as
labour, and hence, sex worker rights. However, the GAATW position, (influenced by the sex
worker rights movement) which depended on the distinction between voluntary and forced sex
work, and which at the time appeared to have the most influence on international policy, I also
considered dangerous. For, I argued, this position, as articulated in much NGO work and in
government/international policy, only spoke of the protection of the ‘forced’ prostitute. Of
what should be done to ensure that the rights of the ‘willing’ prostitute were protected, there
was a deafening silence. This argument was nearly identical to that of neo-abolitionist feminists
in their critique of the forced/voluntary divide. Wendy Chapkis, in a later publication (2003),
identifies the similarities in my arguments and those of Kathleen Barry – similarities that I
resisted admitting for years.
I put the case to my fellow sex worker rights activists that there was a pressing need for sex
workers to engage with the trafficking debates – to end the tacit division of tasks between sex
worker groups (rights for ‘voluntary’ sex workers) and trafficking groups (help for ‘forced’
prostitutes.) This concrete division of tasks neatly mirrored the abstract views of ‘choice’ and
‘force’. Many other activists agreed with me, and I helped organise the NSWP international
delegation to the Beijing Women’s Conference to lobby around the issue of trafficking. The
NSWP delegation held a session on trafficking and sex worker rights at the NGO conference.
29
At the UN conference, we participated in the Human Rights Caucus (confusingly, the name is
the same as the one used by ‘our’ lobby group at the Vienna Trafficking Protocol
Negotiations) trafficking-subgroup along with GAATW. Together, we lobbied delegates
concerning language about trafficking and prostitution in the draft Beijing Declaration. This
was the first time that sex workers had participated in a UN conference, and also the first time
that a sex worker rights organisation was granted recognised NGO status by the UN.
In many ways, this collaboration between the NSWP and GAATW to influence the Beijing
Declaration was a prelude to our later collaboration in Vienna. It marked the first collaboration
between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists at an international conference.
However, basic ideological difference simmered under the unity of our joint declarations and
statements. As sex worker activists who had already begun to question the political effects of
the use of the term ‘forced prostitution’, we found ourselves lobbying for its inclusion in front
of the word ‘prostitution’ everywhere in the document. We found ourselves in this
uncomfortable position as CATW were also out lobbying in force. To a large degree we were
successful, and the Beijing Declaration only links trafficking to ‘forced prostitution’, rather
than all prostitution. These ideological differences were replayed in the anti-trafficking/sex
worker coalition in Vienna.
The Vienna negotiations concerning the 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol
In December, 2000, over 80 countries signed the 'Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish
Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children' (The Trafficking Protocol) in
Palermo, Italy. This event was the culmination of over two years of negotiations at the UN
Centre for International Crime Prevention in Vienna (also known as the Crimes Commission).
The Trafficking Protocol was the subject of intense lobbing by transnational networks of
feminist anti-trafficking NGOs. What is particularly interesting about the Vienna process, is
that the transnational networks of feminist anti-trafficking NGOs were bitterly divided in their
approach to trafficking in women. In effect, the lobby was split into two ‘camps’: both framing
their approaches to trafficking in feminist terms, in agreement about the size and scope of the
problem, and univocal in demanding an international response. Both groups were made up of
feminists and human rights activists from the developing world and the developed world. Yet,
these similarities proved meaningless in the face of the deep ideological divide that split the
30
lobby groups. The essence of this ideological divide concerned the relationship between
‘trafficking in women’ and ‘consent’.
One of the lobby groups was spearheaded by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
(CATW), an international NGO with strong local affiliates throughout the world. This lobby
group referred to itself as the ‘International Human Rights Network’. CATW is an
‘abolitionist’ organisation: they argue that prostitution is a form a sexual violence which can
never be consented to or chosen as a profession. CATW co-director Dorchen Leidholdt
writes:
The sexual exploitation of women and children by local and global sex industries
violates the human rights of all women and children whose bodies are reduced to
sexual commodities in this brutal and dehumanising marketplace. While experienced
as pleasure by the prostitution consumers and as lucrative sources of income by sex
industry entrepreneurs, prostitution, sex trafficking, and related practices are, in fact,
forms of sexual violence that leave women and children physically and psychologically
devastated (Leidthold 2000: 1).
In keeping with this view, CATW advocates for measures to make prostitution illegal and to
punish clients as well as brothel owners and other ‘third parties’. If all prostitution is violence,
it follows that anyone involved in helping a woman move from one place to another to engage
in sex work is a trafficker.
The other lobby group was headed by the International Human Rights Law Group (IHRLG)
with the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) and the Asian Women’s
Human Rights Council (AWHRC). Like CATW, IHRLG and GAATW are international
NGOs with strong local affiliates throughout the world. Yet their vision on trafficking and
consent could not be more different: inspired by the global sex worker rights movement,
GAATW sees prostitution as labour. Accordingly, for GAATW, trafficking is characterised by
the use of force during the migration process and/or the consequent labour or services. Traffic
in persons and forced prostitution are,
manifestations of violence against women and the rejection of these practices, which
are a violation of the right to self determination, must hold within itself the respect for
the self determination of adult persons who are voluntarily engaged in prostitution
(GAATW 1994).
This configuration of transnational lobby groups called itself the Human Rights Caucus.
31
I and other sex worker rights activists were concerned about the impact of a new international
trafficking instrument on the lives of sex workers. Historically, anti-trafficking measures have
been used against sex workers themselves, rather than against ‘traffickers’. Along with several
other activists from the Network of Sex Work Projects, I joined the Human Rights Caucus in
their lobby efforts, in the hope of ensuring a result that would not damage sex worker’s human
rights. What made past anti-trafficking measures so harmful was the fact that they were based
on the idea that women could not consent to prostitution. Consent was also the most highly
contested term during the Protocol negotiations.
The differences between the lobby groups became most apparent in the most controversial
part of the Protocol negotiations-deciding just how 'trafficking in persons' should be defined.
CATW’s lobby group argued that a woman should be considered a victim of trafficking
regardless of any force or deception. Simply by virtue of having a third party involved in
movement, she was to be considered a victim of trafficking. The Human Rights Caucus argued
that force or deception was a necessary condition in the definition of trafficking, and that
‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ should not be linked in the Protocol, as men, women and
children are trafficked for a large variety of services, including sweatshop labour and
agriculture.
The Protocol serves as a ‘discourse event’ through which to track traces of narratives on
trafficking, and in which to locate some of the contested threads of debate; from the
forced/voluntary distinction, to neo-abolitionist and neo-regulationist perspectives on
appropriate international policy. More than anything, it serves – in a way that mere
documentary analysis and interviews never could – as a rich site for ethnographic analysis,
juxtaposing my engagement as a participant observer against the backdrop of internet activism
which I had privileged access to as an activist. It allowed comparison with behind-the-scenes
interactions and the play of discourse and power in the negotiations themselves. As activists
engaged in lobbying the Protocol, members of the Human Rights Caucus worked out our
positions regarding the questions around prostitution, choice, and the need to define
trafficking through email discussions. Email discussions also took place on the NSWP-list,
which gave all NSWP members the chance to comment on these questions and the stance of
the HRC in regards to them. As an active participant in these discussions, I was able to draw
32
on this rich source of evidence when reflecting on and writing about my experiences at the
negotiations in Vienna. When I returned to these mails – over 400 sent before, during and
after the negotiations – I was transported back to the passion, excitement and emotions
ranging from despair to triumph that lobbying entailed.
As an event with significant international visibility, the Protocol negotiations were refracted in
accounts in the media, as well as in documents of various kinds. These range from proposals
and positions of NGOs, to national government policy proposals. The Protocol can be seen as
the codification of consent in international agreement. This rich and complex field of
meanings, stalked by the spectre of ‘white slavery’ debates and paralleled, not just by framings
and arguments, but by the kind of actors who were part of them, shed important light on the
questions with which this thesis engages.
Myth and consent
This thesis is structured around two key concepts: myth and consent. I will not, thus, be
looking at the image the ‘white slave’ or her modern-day counterpart, the ‘trafficking victim’
and contrasting it with the ‘reality’ of prostitute’s lives, as though it were simply a matter of illinformed representation. Nor will I be attempting to ‘uncover the meaning’ of myths of ‘white
slavery’ or a ‘trafficking’ as a metaphorical or allegorical correspondence. How then do I
approach the arena of debates around white slavery and trafficking? I approach it as the effects
of discourse. In approaching ‘trafficking in women’ as a discourse, I am concerned with how
certain definitions of the problem become dominant, whose knowledge is accepted and whose
sidelined, and the social practices involved in constructing and legitimating knowledge: in
short, in the relationship between power and knowledge. This research uses the concepts of
myth and ideology to interrogate the knowledges (truth claims) – both empirical and
theoretical – about ‘trafficking in women’ through a genealogical examination of the historical
circumstances of their production. The research is concerned with, in Hajer’s words, ‘the ways
in which certain problems are represented, differences are played out, and social coalitions on
specific meanings somehow emerge’ (1995: 44).
33
Hajer notes that, ‘It has become almost a platitude to characterize public problems as socially
constructed’ (1995: 42). Nonetheless, most research into trafficking eschews a social
constructionist approach in favour of a positivist approach. By far the majority of research on
trafficking in women is concerned with documenting and explaining the ‘phenomena’ of
trafficking itself: it attempts to establish who is being trafficked, who is doing the trafficking,
how it is happening, why it is happening, and what can be done. This research can be helpful
in correcting assumptions and misunderstandings about ‘trafficking in women’, and can serve
as a basis for creating policy that will better protect the human rights of migrant (sex) workers.
However, an approach that seeks to establish the ‘facts’ about trafficking, valuable as it may be,
leaves unanswered the questions of how these ‘facts’ will be interpreted and which
interpretations will come to be accepted as legitimate knowledge. To answer this, we need to
look at the effect of power on knowledge: the way in which social power is exercised in
knowledge creation and the ways in which representations of people and problems are used to
legitimate knowledge. Foucault (1975, [1991]) suggests that we abandon the idea that
knowledge can exist where power is absent:
We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge (and not simply by
encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that
power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations…In short, it is not the activity of
the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to
power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which
it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge (p.27-28,
emphasis added).
Even social constructionist research which focuses more directly on power, such as feminist
research, tends to look at power relations only in so far as they are seen to cause of the ‘real
practices’ of ‘trafficking in women’. Thus trafficking is characterised as the result of women’s
sexual subordination (Barry 1979, 1995) and/or women’s economic subordination as well as
the result of inequitable development and ‘globalisation’ (e.g. Sassen 2002; Outshoorn 1998;
Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997; Lazaridis 2001). Of course, power relations – gendered, economic,
class-based – do impact on migration for the sex industry, and are worthy of investigation.
However, what is missing in these accounts is a critical examination of the power involved in
34
producing knowledge about ‘trafficking in women’ and the ways in which dominant
constructions of the issue emerge and are incorporated into policy. What remains to be
investigated are the relationships among those who shape meanings of ‘trafficking in women’
and between these ‘discourse masters’ and the object of their concern: the ‘sex slaves’.
Methodology, myth and meaning
When I first came across the notion of white slavery as a myth, when researching my MA
thesis, it seemed to me to be the perfect concept through which to explore the productions of
meaning around trafficking.25 The notion of trafficking in women as myth spoke to me
because it seemed to apply so aptly to the dissonances between my own experiences as a sex
worker, the experiences I knew from other sex workers, and the way that sex work was being
portrayed in ‘trafficking in women’ discourses. Its immediate appeal lay in the idea that what
was being said was a distortion of what was ‘really happening’. In my MA thesis, I argued that
‘trafficking in women’ was a contemporary manifestation of what historians characterised as
the myth of ‘white slavery’. Accounts of trafficking, I argued, consistently coupled their
arguments for protection of innocent women with narrative elements which undermined
women’s agency and amplified the threat of migration.
My interpretation of trafficking in this earlier research relied on a concept of myth which
consisted of two elements: firstly, that of myth as a distortion of the truth (trafficking ‘hid’
what was really occurring in terms of migration of sex workers) and secondly, that of myth as a
metaphor, a way of explaining a complicated and threatening reality (trafficking narratives as
stories that encoded, for example, fear of women’s sexuality). While this ‘dualistic’
interpretation of myth allowed me to explore trafficking discourses in a way that involved
questioning otherwise accepted meanings, it was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, which
I sought to resolve in this thesis. In summary, my key discomfort with this interpretation of
myth is that it depends on a static, reified, and a-historical notion of ‘consent’ in attempting to
‘disprove’ the myth of white slavery/trafficking.
This insight was facilitated through my discovery of the work of historian Pamela Haag (1999).
In her fascinating study of sexual consent and its relationship to American liberalism, Haag
25
Later published in Gender Issues (Doezema 2000).
35
devotes a section to white slavery. She explores white slavery as a ‘dominant idiom’ of sexual
violence. Haag offers a corrective to the a-historic approach to myth, as she explains:
My approach here is not to question, as other historians have done, whether white
slavery was “true” or functionally a myth, an expression of the notorious sexual
queasiness and inability on the part of the middle class to envision women as agents or
to see how women might have exercised “choice”. Such a question assumes that coercion or
“sexual slavery” has a fixed meaning – that if women were not literally taken or physically restrained
then white slavery was a distortion of situations that were not “really” coercive as we understand that
term. Yet white slavery was as real or as true as other definitions of coercion or consent, given that
these terms acquire substantive meanings in historical context (p. 64, emphasis added).
Haag’s observation points to the ways in which the ‘truth’ of white slavery was related to the
concepts of consent that informed it. At the trafficking negotiations, as explained above, the
definition of trafficking became completely dependent on interpretations of the idea of
women’s consent in relation to prostitution. These debates, as those of white slavery, were
entered into by different social groups whose ideological struggle was articulated through
‘consent’, as displayed in discourses of trafficking.
The perspectives of another theorist, Ernesto Laclau (1990, 1997), helped me give needed
depth to the idea of myth as a metaphor. Two parts of Laclau’s analysis of myth and ideology
proved particularly illuminating: first, his concept of myth as the metaphor for an ideal society
and second, of myth as a necessary part of any society. Throughout the thesis, I have sought to
braid Haag’s insights about the construction of ‘consent’ with Laclau’s insights regarding myth
as a inevitable part of social struggle. As against a reading of myth which sees it as powerful
because it can provide a singular, simple explanation of reality, this combined theoretical
perspective suggests that white slavery/trafficking is a powerful myth, not because it unifies or
crystallises different perceptions of consent, but precisely because it can, and does,
accommodate and provide a powerful vehicle for the advancement of varied and even
opposing ideologies, including opposing feminist ideologies.
Chapter Two takes the ideas of myth and ideology as its central point. It sets out the
theoretical context for my exploration of ‘trafficking in women’ as myth, through bringing
together the work of white slavery historians and putting these in critical conversation with
theorists of myth and ideology. Theories of political myth are reviewed, through which the
36
notion of ideology emerges as a key concept for an understanding of myth. The chapter draws
on Laclau and Eagleton to illustrate how ‘ideology’ can help in understanding the power and
persistence of the myth of white slavery/trafficking. The chapter uses the exploration of
political myth and ideology to interrogate the basis of the truth claims of white slavery and
trafficking narratives, setting out the limitations of a purely empirical approach to the subject
of ‘trafficking in women’.
The following two Chapters, Three and Four, focus on a historical exploration of the myth of
white slavery, analysing it in the context of myth as set out in chapter two. These chapters lay
the groundwork for an examination of the parallels in the narratives of white slavery and
trafficking. They are close readings of historical accounts of white slavery. As the present
chapter begins by showing contemporary narratives of trafficking, so the analysis of these two
chapters is based on popular narratives of white slavery. At the same time, the analysis
continues to put the various historians of white slavery in conversation with each other, and
subjects them to the developing theoretical framework of myth and ideology. The aim of the
analysis is to set out a framework for exploring trafficking in women as a myth, historicising
current debates.
Chapter Three explores the myth of white slavery as it appeared in Great Britain. Looking at
the works of feminist Josephine Butler and journalist William T. Stead, the chapter examines
the function of narrative in the context of myth. It demonstrates the ways in which narrative
contributes to the ‘real seemingness’ of myth, making it appear as a description of reality, as set
out in Chapter Two. It explores the way in which the figure of the white slave was constructed
as an innocent victim, in opposition to the willing whore, complicit in her own downfall. The
notion of consent runs through these conceptions of the victim/whore, marking the dividing
line between those deserving of rescue and those deserving condemnation. The chapter
explores how discourses of white slavery, and the ideas of consent they contained, also worked
within larger discourses of class and empire. Throughout the analysis, parallels are signposted
between the maneuverings of consent in white slavery discourses and in contemporary
discourses of trafficking.
37
Chapter Four continues the analysis of the myth of white slavery, moving to examination of
the myth in the United States, and setting the concept of ‘metaphor’ central. The chapter
critically investigates the idea, used by many historians, of white slavery as a ‘metaphor’ for
social anxieties caused by rapid processes of social change. It suggests that a more satisfactory
concept of metaphor is achieved through taking account of Laclau’s ideas of myth as the
model of an ideal society. Drawing on a variety of narratives of white slavery, the chapter
continues to investigate how differing notions of consent were articulated through differing
interpretations of white slavery ‘really’ was. Discourses of race and nation and their
relationship to the myth of trafficking are explored, and implications for current discourses of
trafficking are indicated.
The second half of this thesis takes the concepts and analysis presented in the discussion of
the myth of white slavery as a theoretical template through which to view discourses of
trafficking in women. Myth, metaphor, ideology and narrative are employed to be able to
answer the knotty questions of how NGOs and states tried to define trafficking. My
experiences as a lobbyist in Vienna form the basis of the analysis in this section.
Chapter Five begins with an examination of early 20th century international agreements on
white slavery, tracking the ways in which consent was used in these early agreements. The
lexical threads of consent are pulled through to the Vienna negotiations, showing how the
distinction between the ‘victim’ and the ‘willing whore’ shaped NGO and state responses in
Vienna. In particular, the chapter examines the ways in which the ‘suffering body’ of the
prostitute informed the neo-abolitionist lobby headed by CATW in Vienna. I argue that
CATW’s abolitionist feminist arguments about the nature of prostitution were refracted by
those of states who sought to close borders and limit human rights protections for ‘trafficking
victims’.
Chapter Six combines a close analysis of the relationships between sex workers and antitrafficking activists in the Human Rights Caucus with an examination of the development of
the definition of trafficking in persons at the Vienna negotiations. It returns in depth to the
questions set out in the beginning of this chapter around the complicated relationships
38
between feminism, sex worker rights, and the need to define trafficking in women at the
Vienna Protocol. It shows the ways in which the discourse of trafficking, even when used by
feminists sympathetic to sex worker rights, can in effect make the subject of the sex worker
‘disappear’.
I have sought in the course of my research, in my activism and in interpreting my experiences
in sex work to constantly be aware of the differences of meaning within the myth of
trafficking, and in the ways in which these are employed. Discovering and reflecting on the
academic writings I used for this thesis has made me aware of the need to turn the same
critical lens on the sex worker rights counter-discourse to trafficking (as sketched above): that
of the ‘consenting’ migrant sex worker. It has made me aware of how I am involved in the
production of myths, and of the possibilities for societal transformation that a self-aware
utilisation of myth might afford. The thesis concludes by drawing out the parallels between the
myth of white slavery and the contemporary myth of trafficking, and suggesting ways in which
the ‘old’ myths might be transformed into ‘new’ myths that involve a reframing of our ideas of
consent, rights, migration and sexuality.
39
Chapter Two: White slavery and trafficking as political myth
I don’t know anything about the so-called white slave trade, for the simple reason
that no such thing exists…it was left for the enlightened twentieth century to
create the Great American Myth. ‘White slavery is abroad in our land! Our
daughters are being trapped and violated and held prisoners and sold for fabulous
sums (a flattering unction, this) and no woman is safe…the belief in this myth has
become a fixed delusion in the minds of many otherwise sane persons (Madeleine,
an early twentieth century prostitute and madam, quoted in Connelly 1980: 132).
The parallels between the manipulation and misrepresentation of statistics in the campaigns
against white slavery and in today’s anti-trafficking campaigns are easy to draw. However,
to see all white slavery campaigners, and by analogy, all anti-trafficking campaigners, as
deliberately exaggerating to achieve political goals is to overemphasise their cynicism. Apart
from newspapers eager to increase circulation through sensationalism, or perhaps
politicians ready to hop on a bandwagon for political gain, we cannot assume that most of
these dedicated campaigners, then and now, were/are deliberately spreading falsehoods.
While exaggeration may at times be a political strategy, the depth of commitment by
today’s campaigners and their historical counterparts attests to the their belief in the
existence of trafficking/white slavery on a vast scale. Why did so many people believe in
white slavery? And if records of the time show so little evidence, how are we to account for
its political potency?
Similar questions might be asked for today’s trafficking narratives. In this chapter, I draw
on some of theoretical resources that may be useful to make sense of the phenomena of
white slavery and trafficking. Drawing on the work of historians of the white slavery era,
and particularly that if Grittner (1990), I suggest that the concept of myth offers a useful
starting point for my analysis of trafficking. It can move us beyond an empirical focus to an
examination of why and how certain groups in society, including feminists, are so invested
in the myth. If, as Grittner argues, ‘white slavery’ was a cultural myth with repressive
consequences for women, especially prostitutes, and subaltern men, what are the
implications of this for the current campaign against ‘trafficking in women’? This chapter
argues that an understanding of the ways in which myth is informed by ideology can help
us understand not only the reasons for appearance of the white slave in history, but also
the re-appearance of her mythical successor, the trafficking victim.
40
Myth and ideology
Current accounts of ‘trafficking in women’ vie with ‘white slavery’ stories in their use of
sensational descriptions and emotive language, though the ‘victims’ are no longer white,
western European or American women, but women from the third-world or the former
Eastern bloc.
Trafficking Cinderella features gut wrenching testimonies of broken dreams, withered
illusions, rape and humiliation from six Eastern European girls sold as prostitutes
throughout the world. This film was made on behalf of all these lost girls;
confused by the crumbling post-communist reality they became an easy prey for
pimps, procurers and sex-traffickers.26
Think of it. You’re a young girl brought from Burma, you have been kidnapped or
bought. You’re terrified.…if you haven’t already been raped along the way (or
sometimes even if you have) you’re immediately brought to the “Room of the
Unveiling of the Virgin”. There you are raped continuously-until you can no
longer pass for a virgin. Then you are put to work (Mirkenson 1994: 1).
It is possible to see in these stories the re-working of several of the motifs identified in the
first chapter: innocence; youth and virginity; deception and violence. Looking at Grittner’s
use of the notion of ‘culture myth’ can begin to provide some first clues towards an
explanation for the similarity in white slavery and trafficking narratives. According to
Grittner, a myth does not simply imply something that is ‘false’, but is rather a collective
belief that simplifies reality. Grittner explains his conception of myth as follows:
As an uncritically accepted collective belief, a myth can help explain the world and
justify social institutions and actions.…When it is repeated in similar form from
generation to generation, a myth discloses a moral content, carrying its own
meaning, secreting its own values. The power of myth lies in the totality of
explanation. Rough edges of experience can be rounded off. Looked at
structurally, a cultural myth is a discourse, “a set of narrative formulas that acquire
through specifiable historical action a significant ideological charge” (Grittner
1990: 7, quote from Slotkin 1985).
In this conception, myth is seen as more than a simple distortion or misrepresentation of
facts. Slotkin’s (1985) definition points to the ways in which myth is connected to ideology.
This broad notion of myth – as a narrative or story which carries ideological overtones –
moves us beyond a search for the simple factuality of white slavery and trafficking
narratives. Flood’s 1996 study of political myth argues that an understanding of ideology is
26
Publicity flyer for the documentary ‘Trafficking Cinderella’, dir. Mira Niagolova, distributed at the
Transnational Training Seminar on Trafficking in Women, June 20-24, Budapest.
41
essential to understanding how myth functions in political process.27 Flood defines political
myth as 'an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of
past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by
a social group' (1996: 44). Flood’s comprehensive review of theorists of political myth
demonstrates the ways in which different conceptions of ideology in turn influence how
theorists conceptualise myth. One of the most famous examples of this is Sorel’s idea of
the Syndicalist general strike as a utopian social myth which embodies in its totality the idea
of Socialism:
The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of
popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is,
whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of
the revolutionary proletariat…general strike…is …the myth in which Socialism is
wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments
which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against
modern society (Sorel 1908 [1999]: 5).
Contemporary theorists of myth, as examined below, have retained these ideas of political
myth as images or stories that are able to promote a collective response, the notion of myth
as a reflection of how society should be. These theorists view myth as the expression of
ideology. However, to define myth in terms of its relationship to ideology begs the
question of what 'ideology' exactly is.
Do we need ideology?
The notion of ideology is anything but uncontested: Eagleton (1991) lists sixteen ways in
which 'ideology' might be approached. Thus it does not come as surprise that distinctions
between myth and ideology often blur in studies of political myth. For example, Tom
Brass' (2000) study of the 'agrarian myth' of peasant societies both equates myth with
ideology 'the agrarian myth is an essentialist ideology' (p. 11) and argues that the agrarian
myth 'by itself' is powerless: only 'deployed as part of wider ideological struggle is it capable
of exercising a political impact' (p. 313). Eagleton (1991), states that the relationship
between myth and ideology is not clear, and indeed, he himself is not clear, arguing both
that the concept of myth is more and less inclusive than ideology. For the purposes of this
study, I wish to avoid an overly schematic and ahistorical search for 'ideal types'. The
concept of ideology is important for the study of the myth of white slavery/trafficking for
the light it can shed on important questions relating to the origin, validity, function and
27 The
other great source of influence on myth studies, that of religion, has had much less influence on
theorists of political myth (Flood 1996; Doty 2000).
42
power of the myth, rather than as an abstract theoretical construct. I will thus leave fluid
the boundaries between myth and ideology, as well as definitions of them. As Eagleton
(1991) says:
the term ‘ideology’ has a whole range of useful meanings…to try to compress this
wealth of meaning into a single comprehensive definition would thus be unhelpful
even if it were possible. The word ‘ideology’, one might say, is a text, woven of a
whole tissue of different conceptual strands….it probably more important to
access what is valuable or can be discarded…then to merge them forcibly into
some Grand Global Theory (p. 1).
Nevertheless, it is helpful to review some of the most prevalent conceptions of ideology in
order to determine just what is ‘valuable’ and what can be ‘discarded’ for the purposes of
this study.
The question of 'what is ideology?' has a rather quaint Soviet-esque ring these days, when
the countries formerly at the front of the iron curtain are now in the queue to join the EU.
Though the term is still very much in use in everyday speech, it has gone rather out of
fashion in academia, replaced by the more capacious ‘discourse’. Ideology’s traditional
concern with ‘truth’ and distortion seems decidedly old-fashioned when faced with the
body blow dealt to notions of ahistorical, transcendental ‘truth’ by post-modernism. And if
ideology is out of fashion, myth is the academic equivalent of love-beads and peace-sign
necklaces. Myth was a central concept in the work of the standard-bearers of highstructuralism, theorists such as Barthes and Levi-Strauss, but like ‘ideology’ was outshone
by the ‘discourse’ and ‘deconstruction’ of the hot young designers of post-structuralist
haute couture. Yet I’ll risk looking like I’ve wandered away from a 1960s’ theme party
decked out in my structuralist garb, by arguing that myth and ideology have a useful
function when looking at trafficking.
If ideology is so out of fashion on the political and academic front, what is the point of
examining it here? Isn’t it possible and preferable to do away with ideology altogether when
examining white slavery and trafficking? I am encouraged to see an abiding usefulness in
the term, based on my readings of two highly influential cultural commentators, who both
argue for the need to retain ideology, though for very different reasons.
Terry Eagleton, in his 1991 book Ideology, An Introduction, argues that the academic and
progressive-left abandonment of ‘ideology’ for ‘discourse’ ended up throwing out the baby
43
with the bathwater. For Eagleton, the diffuseness of power as diagnosed by Foucault’s
(1975, [1991] )‘disciplinary mechanisms’ leaves us with no centre to fix our analysis upon.
This centre can be found, he suggests, in the notion of ‘ideology’. This is linked to his
condemnation of what he views as the relativism of post-modernism. For Eagleton (2003),
the notion of a superior, or even an ‘absolute’ truth is not an anathema but the
cornerstone of ethical political and cultural life (2003). Eagleton argues that focusing on
‘ideology’ can help bring questions of truth to the forefront, banishing the spectre of the
post-modern scenario of a bunch of commensurate truths.
Ernesto Laclau (1997) looks for the ‘resurrection’ of ideology in a different area. Rather
than arguing against the post-modern attack on truth, Laclau pushes the post-modern case
against ideology to the point that it collapses under its own inherent contradictions. 28 At
this point of collapse, ideology emerges transfigured (if marked by the resurrection). Thus
we see that the lack of a centre identified by Eagleton as a reason to reclaim ideology from
the morass of post-modern relativism is for Laclau the cornerstone upon which ideology is
resurrected, ‘a starting point for a possible re-emergence of a notion of ideology which is
not marred by the stumbling blocks of an essentialist theorisation’ (p. 300). Rather than
distort an original truth, the function of ideology, according to Laclau, is in giving the
illusion that this truth ever existed. Ideological distortion exists even in the absence of an
original truth to distort.
Laclau achieves his resurrection with Althusser playing Lazarus. Dead and staying dead are
Althusser’s notions of the strict separation between science and ideology. Alive again and
rolling away the stone from the tomb are Althusser’s ideas about the indispensability of
ideology, ideology as a ‘necessary illusion’, and in particular the idea of interpellation – of a
necessary mis-recognition in the constitution of the individual subject. Althusser, in his
essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (1971), stated that: ‘Ideology represents the
28
According to Laclau: ‘The crisis of the notion of “ideology” was linked to two interconnected processes:
the decline of social objectivism and the denial of the possibility of a metalinguistic vantage point which
allows the unmasking of ideological distortion' (p. 320). Or, more clearly: ‘Categories such as “distortion” and
“false representation” [only] made sense as long as something “true” or “undistorted” was considered to be
within human reach’ (1997:298). The notion of discourse ‘ideologized’ ideology, as Laclau notes of Zizek’s
analysis in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1994):
Here Zizek correctly detects the main source of the progressive abandonment of “ideology” as an
analytical category: “this notion somehow grows” too strong, it begins to embrace everything,
inclusive of the very neutral, extra-ideological ground supposed to provide the standard by means
of which one can measure ideological distortion. That is to say, is it not the ultimate result of
discourse analysis that the order of discourse as such is inherently “ideological”? (Laclau 1997: 298).
44
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (p. 109). This
mis-recognition takes place through ‘interpellation’, in which individuals are turned into
ideological subjects.29 Laclau retains Althusser’s idea of ideology as a necessary illusion, but
moves the grounds of illusion from the individual to the very idea of society itself. If for
Althusser it is the subject that is interpellated through ideology, for Laclau, it is society –
the community as a whole.
Laclau turns Eagleton’s argument on its head: it is because there is no centre, no ultimate
truth, that ideology is necessary. Ideology is thus also, of course, impossible, for no
distortion can occur without something that is undistorted to begin with. This impossible
‘constituent distortion’ of ideology is a necessary condition of society, making society the
‘impossible and necessary object’. The dialectics between the antimonies of impossibility
and necessity is the process of ideology.
Laclau gives the following example of how ideology works:
Let us suppose that at some point, in a Third World country, nationalisation of the
basic industries is proposed as an economic panacea. Now this just a technical way
of running the economy and if it remains so it will never become an ideology.
How does the transformation into the latter take place? Only if the particularity of
the economic measure starts incarnating something more and different from itself:
for instance, the emancipation from foreign domination, the elimination of
capitalist waste, the possibility of social justice for excluded population, etc. In
sum: the possibility of constituting the community as a coherent whole. That
impossible object – the fullness of the community – appears here as depending on
a particular set of transformations at the economic level. This is the ideological
effect strictu sensu: the belief that there is a particular social arrangement which can
bring about the closure and transparency of the community (1997: 303).
Ideology and trafficking
Laclau and Eagleton’s arguments for the abiding usefulness of ‘ideology’ resonated with me
when it came to looking at trafficking. I believe that the term ‘ideology’ can be valuable
when looking at trafficking, that it ‘gets at’ something which is not captured by talk of
29 Althusser
uses the example of a police officer hailing someone in the street, not by using their name,
simply calling "'Hey, you there!'"(1971 [2001]: 118). Even without their name being called, this person will
recognise themselves in the call of the official:
The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical
conversion, he becomes a subject…what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in
the street), in reality takes place in ideology …That is why those who are in ideology believe
themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of
the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, "I am ideological "(1971
[2001]: 118) (see Felluga 2003).
45
trafficking as discourse. What is that something? What are the connotations that it carries,
that spring to mind, that are implied by ideology?
First, the value of Eagleton’s arguments for this study lies in the refocusing on truth, on
questions of epistemology. The impossibility of truth has become, if not a new truth, then
certainly a truism. In the social sciences, this is so recognised that a few words from
Foucault, or reference to a ‘multiplicity of truths’ at the beginning of an article, situate the
author within the ‘proper’ new tradition. Often, this seems like a gloss, so the author can
get down to the business of showing whatever it was they wanted to show in the first place.
The derelegation of questions of epistemology (Eagleton 1991) make a prolonged
argument into the need to dispense with evaluations of truth in discourses of trafficking in
women seem unnecessary. Surely it is enough simply to state that there is no ultimate
‘truth’, or that the various positions in the trafficking debate represent ‘multiple truths’ and
go from there into an analysis of the various discourses?
Yet, in the study of white slavery as myth, we return time and time again to the question of
truth. The word myth connotes falsehood, and this is how the myth of white slavery has
largely been understood by historians. To deal with the questions regarding the falsehood
of myth means that we also need to deal with its postulated opposite. As reviewed below,
attempts to distinguish the truth about white slavery from the myth preoccupy historians.
Similarly, research on trafficking today is dominated by empirical studies. The questions
policy makers and NGOs want answered is how many women are being trafficked? From
where? I hope to show that these questions cannot be answered by a straightforward
review of empirical evidence; that the problem is not one of inadequate definitions or
statistical shortcomings (as has most often been argued) but a matter of differing
ideologies.
Second, ideology as theorised by Laclau inspires a focus on community and conflict.
Ideology captures better the idea of political struggle, of winners and losers, of strategies
and compromise, of power given and taken: it foregrounds conflict in a way that the rather
bloodless ‘discourse’ does not.30 This is important for trafficking, as meanings about what
trafficking is have been the site of major political conflicts between feminists, sex workers,
30
This is highly ironic, given that it is arguably Foucault who is most responsible for the present ubiquity of
the term ‘discourse’, and that the other term that is most connected with his work is that of ‘power’.
46
and states. Chapters Six and Seven concentrate on this political struggle, showing how
different groups have wielded their ideologies in the international policy arena in the
discussions around the 2000 Trafficking Protocol. Combined with Laclau’s (1990) own
earlier theorisations about the role of myth in society, examined in Chapter Four, this
enables us to begin to answer the question of why the myth of trafficking is powerful again
at this point in history.
Ideology, truth and power
These aspects of ideology – epistemology and political struggle – which are most helpful in
relation to a study of white slavery/trafficking are loosely reflected in what Eagleton (1991)
and McLellan (1995) have distinguished as the two main strands of thought around
ideology.31 One of these is primarily concerned with ideology as epistemology and a
distortion of truth. The second leaves aside epistemological questions, looking instead at
how ideology functions in society. The influence of both these approaches on histories of
white slavery are examined in the following section. The purpose of this review is to find
out whether the approaches historians apply to the ideological narratives of the white
slavery myth are suitable for examining contemporary ideological narratives of trafficking
in women. Through an examination of their work, a new understanding of how to apply
theories of ideology to an understanding of trafficking can emerge: a synthesis of
contemporary approaches to ideology.
Ideology and myth as distorted reality
Historians’ search for the empirical truth of white slavery fits in with what Eagleton terms
the 'rationalist' approach to ideology, in which ideology is seen as 'a collection of distorting
representations of reality and empirically false statements' (Eagleton 1991: 18). The purpose
of this distortion, according to this view of ideology, is political: it is concerned with the
getting or keeping of power by particular social groups. This is a very common way of
viewing ideology. John Thompson’s (1984) definition of ideology as ‘the ways in which
meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination' (p. 45) is, according to
Eagleton, 'the single most widely accepted definition of ideology' (1991: 5). According to
Thompson (1990), there are a number of ideological strategies that a dominant power uses
to legitimise itself: this 'mystification' involves distorting or obscuring social realities in
ways to suppress conflict. Political myth in this conception of ideology is a weapon of the
31
Though I have focused on the ‘epistemological’ influence of Eagleton and the ‘political struggle’ influence
of Laclau for this study, both of their work on ‘ideology’ spans and exceeds each of these traditions.
47
powerful, a falsehood through which the dominant power can legitimise and consolidate its
position. For example, Bank (1999) uses Thompson's framework in his genealogy of a the
Afrikaner ‘Great Trek’ myth, central to the ideology of apartheid. He writes: ‘the stories
embodied in myths should be interpreted as universal features of ideological structures. As
such, they need to be located within these wider ideological structures and analysed in
terms of the mobilisation of meaning in the context of unequal relations of power (p. 462).
To what extent has this approach been used in histories of white slavery? Guy (1991)
argues that white slavery was primarily a vehicle for patriarchal and racist ideologies. Other
historians, such as Hobson (1987), Nead (1988) and Walkowitz (1980, 1992) detail how
groups that might be considered 'dominant' used white slavery to promote their agenda.
However, while historians have shown white slavery's links to dominant ideologies, they
also document how oppositional groupings, such as those concerned with women's
suffrage, harnessed the myth of white slavery to their political chariot. The perception of
political myth as a falsehood which helps to sustain a dominant ideology runs into a
number of problems when applied to white slavery. It cannot satisfactorily explain why so
many people appeared to genuinely believe in the existence of white slavery, nor can it
account for the wide appeal of the myth to both dominant and oppositional political
groupings.
White slavery as a map of reality
In recognition of these problems, a number of historians have taken a more neutral
approach to myth and ideology to explore white slavery’s impact. This approach is less
concerned with the truth or falsehood of myth than with its function in society. As
discussed in chapter one, many historians of white slavery have argued on the basis of
historical evidence that the campaign around white slavery distorted reality. Finding little
evidence of actual white slavery, the bulk of their work is then concerned with determining
what 'lay behind' the concern with white slavery. Also discovering through historical
research that the myth of white slavery did not conform to the facts, they look for reasons
for myth’s believability in its function. This approach is summarised by Henry Tudor as:
‘Myth is believed not because it accords with the facts, but because it makes sense of
people’s experience’ (1972: 24). This process is evident in historian Donna Guy’s
observation: 'Rather than reflecting a completely verifiable reality, white slavery was the
construction of a set of discourses about family reform, the role of women's work in
48
modernizing societies, and the gendered construction of politics' (1991: 35). Irwin leaves
aside the question of white slavery's empirical truth altogether: Whether or not white
slavery actually existed or represented a significant factor in prostitution will not be argued
here. Many Victorians were convinced that white slavery existed, while many others were
just as certain that it did not; what is of concern is the dialogue itself' (1996: 1).
Of the white slavery historians, Grittner (1990) is most explicit in his use of the terms myth
and 'ideology' to analyse the response to white slavery. His use of the analytical category of
myth is linked in his work to notion of ideology derived from the anthropologist Geertz
(1969 [1973]). For Geertz, ideology is less a matter of truth or falsehood than a sort of
‘map’ that helps people make sense of complicated reality. Ideologies are ‘maps of
problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience’ (p. 220).
According to Geertz, people need ideologies when certain ways of viewing the world no
longer make sense: they arise in times of social and cultural stress. Drawing on literary
theory, Geertz examines how ideology functions as ‘metaphor’ for problematic social
reality.
In his analysis of the metaphorical aspects of white slavery, Grittner also draws on the
work of Connelly (1980). Connelly takes as his subject the campaign against prostitution in
the US at the end of 19th and beginning of the 20th century, which he calls ‘antiprostitution’.
According to Connelly, anti-white slavery campaigns were a part of the general
antiprostitution movement. Connelly argues that antiprostitution was about more than
prostitution itself : 'antiprostitution had at least as much to do with the anxieties produced
by the transformation of American society…. as with the actual existence of red-light
districts… Prostitution became a master symbol, a code word, for a wide range of anxieties'
(p. 6). Other historians also use this ‘map of reality’ framework, emphasising different
aspects of reality that the metaphor of white slavery corresponds to. Irwin (1996) writes:
In following this evolution, it becomes evident that the white slavery metaphor
comprises an intriguing cluster of ideas concerning men and women, sex and
society, rich and poor, villains and victims, corruption and exploitation. These
themes and the rhetoric of white slavery are connected to the conditions and
cultures of Victorian society (p. 1).
Hobson (1987) writes: 'White slavery was a highly charged metaphor in the Progressive
Era: not only did it capture a belief that all women were potential victims of sexual
49
enslavement; it had as its protagonists an underworld of European immigrants operating an
international traffic in women's bodies' (p. 142).32
A neutral approach to the myth of trafficking?
What are the implications of the above discussion for a study of trafficking in women as
myth? In order to argue that trafficking is a political myth, is it also necessary to show that
it is empirically false? Given the confusing and contradictory nature of the evidence of
trafficking, it is a tempting possibility to argue that trafficking in women is a myth from a
neutral standpoint, that is, to leave aside questions of its empirical truth or falsity. This is
entirely in keeping with what Eagleton terms the discrediting of epistemology in the social
sciences. If political myth (and ideology) is seen in a neutral sense – as a narrative that helps
explain the world, arising in times of crisis – than an analysis of trafficking as myth could
proceed without an examination of its status as ‘true’ or ‘false’, limiting the analysis to
content of trafficking narratives and their political/ideological function. It is quite possible
to decry sexist, racist and nationalistic elements in trafficking debates without questioning
the legitimacy of evidence of trafficking or even the ‘reality’ of trafficking itself. This is the
route taken by a number of perceptive studies of trafficking discourses, such as those by
Pike (1999), Lyons (1999), Gibson (2003), Stenvoll (2002) and Chapkis (2003) .
There are other pressing reasons to abandon the ‘myth as falsehood’ approach when
discussing trafficking in women. The word myth used in conjunction with stories of
trafficking in women can seem insensitive at best, and at worst to be an exercise in
revisionism of the most reprehensible sort. Added to the evidential and ethical problems
involved with judging the myth of trafficking as a falsehood are conception/theoretical
ones. These have been alluded to in the discussion of historians’ approach to white slavery.
A number of theorists of political myth argue that approaching myth as straightforward
falsehood is too limiting (Flood 1996). They argue that what is important in myth is not its
truth, but rather the way it operates in social and political contexts. The arguments for a
neutral approach to myth, mirror arguments that have been made against the notion of
ideology as ‘false consciousness’.
32
There are a number of problems with the ‘myth as metaphor’ approach, which are looked at more fully in
Chapter Five.
50
Like many other concepts which started life with a particular, specific, meaning, the
concept of ‘false consciousness’ is as misunderstood as it is familiar. Once a popular
feminist epithet hurled at ideological opponents, it is now nearly as vilified a term as
‘political correctness’.33 I do not intend to reclaim it: merely to note its importance for the
study of myth. Among Marxist theorists, two broad positions regarding ‘false
consciousness’ can be distinguished (Eagleton 1991). One strand is represented by Barthes,
whose structuralist Mythologies (1973) sees myth as a linguistic distortion linked to bourgeois
dominance. The other strand is represented by Althusser, who like Gramsci (1971), rejects
the notion of ideology as false consciousness (McKlellen 1995).
As we have already seen, one argument against the ‘false consciousness’ interpretation of
myth is that it seems arbitrary to only call beliefs of powerful groups ideological. Another is
that the notion of myth as ‘false’ (corresponding to ideology as ‘delusion’) emphasises
either the deliberate, propagandist spreading of myth or attribute myth to collective
irrationality or delusion (Flood 1996). This, as Eagleton (1991) notes, seems to imply that
the ‘truth’ is accessible only to a group of scientific elite. Also, as Flood (1996) notes, ‘we
can’t know the intentions of those who tell myths or judge the state of mind those who
appear to believe them, except insofar as plausible inferences can be drawn from
contemporary evidence of what these tellers and believers say or do’ (p. 7). The
correspondence between empirical fact and political myth is not straightforward: not only
can there be disagreement about whether the events in question actually occurred, but also
about the way in which certain information is chosen for inclusion, and other information
left out (Flood 1996). Certain myths will be regarded as true by certain social groups and as
untrue by others: and that the reason for these differences is not a matter of ‘getting the
facts right’ but one of differing ideological positions (Flood 1996). Thus Flood argues the
need for ‘close attention to the social contexts in which political myths are circulated’ (p. 7,
8).34
33
‘False consciousness’’ has been used by feminists against politically active sex workers. See Bell (1987).
Banks echoes this in his criticism of what he sees as L. Thompson’s over concern with proving the factual
untruth of Apartheid myths: rather than falling ‘back upon a positivist notion of myth as false stories that can
be tested against the standards of historical truth', he argues that 'the boundaries between political myth and
historical reality are more complex' (p. 462). For Tudor (1972) it is not the place of a student of politics to
denounce a particular set of beliefs as false: rather, the social scientist should be concerned with establishing
how and why people think as they do.
34
51
Is the implication of the above that we should adopt a neutral stance to the myth of
trafficking? That is, examining its form and function, rather than attempting to
demonstrate its empirical falseness? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’. Qualified, for while the
neutral approach avoids the pitfalls outlined above, it runs into some problems of its own,
as we shall see.
True myths?
If political myth is not to be identified primarily because of its falsehood, what criteria are
left for judging whether a statement is a political myth? Theorists who opt for a ‘neutral’
approach to ideology move from a concern with the truth of certain ideological statements
to a concern with their purpose and their form: in other words, the approach changes from
an epistemological to a sociological one. There are two possible ways of seeing the
relationship of myth to truth in this approach. The first approach could be considered
Althussarian. In this approach, questions of truth and falsehood would be seen as largely
irrelevant to ideology or political myth, because ideology and myth are considered to be
above all expressions of lived experience.35 As Eagleton explains: ‘Ideology for Althusser
does indeed represent – but what it represents is the way I 'live' my relations to society as a
whole, which cannot be said to be a question of truth or falsehood' (1991: 18). Against
‘ideology’ Althusser opposes ‘science’, which is the seen as the only ‘true’ (cognitive)
knowledge, open to judgments of truth.
Taken in the Althussarian sense, a neutral approach means that questions of truth or
falsehood would not apply to the concept of political myth. Yet, it is also possible to argue
that one should not immediately condemn all myths as false, but still be able to judge
individual myths according to their truth or falsehood. This is the argument of a second
group of theorists, including Tudor (1972) and Thompson (1984, 1990), who state that
individual myths may be true or false (in terms of their adherence to fact), but that this
does not affect their status as myth: what makes myth/ideology mythical is its function and
its form (Flood 1996). Thus where Althusser posits an ‘epistemological break’ between
ideology and science (Eagleton 1991), the second group smoothes over that break, allowing
that myth may be objectively, scientifically, judged true or false, but that the outcome of
this judgment is either irrelevant to its function as myth (Tudor 1972) or, may be seen
35
'For Althusser, one can speak of descriptions or representations of the world as being either true or false;
but ideology is not for him at root a matter of such descriptions at all, and criteria of truth and falsehood are
thus largely irrelevant to it’ (Eagleton 1991: 18).
52
simply one criteria by which myth should be measured (Thompson 1984). However, this
approach does not resolve the problems of the ‘myth as falsehood’ approach simply by
allowing that some myths may be true.
Having it both ways: the fallacy of truth
If we accept that a neutral approach to the myth of trafficking offers a more satisfactory
analytical framework than one that sees myth as falsehood, does it matter which approach
we take: that of myth as possibly either true or false or one that argues that judgments of
truth cannot be applied to myth? After all, what concerns us in this approach is the form
and function of myth, not its objective truth. Yet, there is a problem with the first
approach, a problem involving a contradiction of method. If myth/ideology is seen as a
sociological process that enables people to make sense of their world, ‘what are the criteria
for identifying an objectively true [or false] myth?’ (Flood 1996: 46). As Flood recognises,
when political myth is judged according to its narrative form and social function, ‘the
functions ascribed to myths are incompatible with a straightforward judgment of truth or
falsehood’(p. 46). These arguments are akin to those made by Turner (1983) in his
discussion of the falseness of ideology. If ideology is a matter of ‘lived belief’ – of ideas that
people adopt in order to make meaningful action in the world possible – how can it be said
to be false? As Eagleton (1991) interprets Turner’s work: ‘For if our lived beliefs are in
some sense internal to our social practices, and if they are thus constitutive of those
practices, they can hardly be said to ‘correspond’ (or not correspond) to them’ (p. 24).
An illustration of the contradiction between attempting to assess myth’s truth while at the
same time treating it as ‘lived belief’ is to be found in some of the work of white slavery
historians. As seen above, a number of historians such as Connelly (1990), Hobson (1987),
Grittner (1990) and Corbin (1990) attempt both to assess the empirical extent of white
slavery and to examine its form (such as film, newspaper accounts) and its function (as
symbol or metaphor). We can take Grittner (1990) as an example. Grittner’s approach to
myth, as shown above, is in the Althusserian mode and thus incompatible with judgments
about the factual truth of a statement. He explains white slavery’s hold on the public
imagination in terms of a Geertzean ‘map of problematic reality’. On the one hand, he
interprets white slavery as a symbolic, metaphoric response to the social strains of early 20th
century America such as fears of urbanisation, immigration, and women’s growing
independence. On the other, he also makes pronouncements, based on historical records,
53
about the factual truth of white slavery. He writes: ‘White slavery did exist, especially within
the immigrant communities of large cities, but it was not the main cause of prostitution’
(p.64). Thus, in Grittner’s work, white slavery is seen as both a false description of reality
and as an expression of lived reality, as a statement to which the criteria of truth and
falsehood do not apply. This contradiction is more than a methodological inconsistency. It
carries profound political consequences, examined below.
To avoid this contradiction, we can follow the Althusserian path, and view ideology purely
as an expression of lived reality, which cannot be considered true or false. Althusser has
been widely criticised for his strict separation between science and ideology. However, one
need not have to follow an Althusserian elevation of science as value-free knowledge,
whose truth is independent of history, to use his points about the nature of representation
in ideology/myth. To argue that in trafficking and white slavery, myth is incorrectly
mistaken for fact is not to adhere to a positivist or rationalist view of myth/ideology. These
views would see a strict separation between fact and value: in a positivist approach, myth
does not belong to the realm of scientific investigation, in a rationalist approach, myth is
error as opposed to the truth of science.
Yet, it is also possible to view the language of myth as discourse. The ideas of Althusser
mesh well with approaches to ideology that incorporate ideas from literary theory and
linguistics. Eagleton (1991) combines these approaches in one of his descriptions of
ideology:
Ideology appears to be a descriptive statement of reality-while 'being secretly
'emotive' (expressive of the lived reality of human subject) or 'conative' (directed
toward the achievement of certain effects). If this is so, then it would seem that
there is a kind of slipperiness or duplicity built into ideological
language…Ideology, Althusser claims, 'expresses a will, a hope or a nostalgia,
rather than describing a reality'; it is fundamentally a matter of fearing and
denouncing, reverencing and reviling, all of which then sometimes gets coded into
a discourse which looks as though it is describing the way things actually are. It is
thus, in the terms of the philosopher J.L. Austin (1962), 'performative' rather than
'constative' language: it belongs to the class of speech acts which get something
done…rather than to the discourse of description' (p. 19)
Or, as Michael Sprinker (1987) interprets Althusser: ‘Ideology is a performative; as such, it
is not regulated according to a regime of truth and falsehood, but by its sheer power to
move’ (p. 36). This conception of ideology can be applied to myth by returning to Sorel,
who stated: ‘myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to
54
act…. A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a
group' (Sorel 1908: 132, 53).
When I first found Eagleton’s description of ideology as performative, I felt jubilant. The
idea of ‘performative’ speech is immediately appealing, and it was familiar to me from
studying the areas of gender and sexuality. The idea of particular types of speech as
‘performative’ was enormously influential in the days of the ‘high theory’ 1980s and 1990s,
for example in ‘queer theory’, with Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) introducing the ideas of
gender and sexuality as performative. However, as in all explanations that seem to provide
the answer, after reflection, this one does not provide them all. One problem is that the
distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘descriptive’ language isn’t as readily apparent as it
might seem. A second problem is that, as used in the description above, there still exists a
sense of a reality that can be misrepresented underlying the notion of a realm of
‘constative’ language. While this solves the problem of the concept of ideology growing too
large to be useful, (Zizek 1994) by bracketing off an area of language and experience that is
untouched by it, the dichotomy between performative and constative language leaves a
realm of language uncontaminated by ideology. A third problem with the above
description, though not necessarily related to the notion of ideology as performative
speech, is that it shows ideology purely in a negative light: ‘fearing and denouncing,
reverencing and reviling’ (Eagleton 1991: 19). But if ideology also ‘expresses a will, hope, or
nostalgia’ (Eagleton 1991: 19) then surely it must also be possible for ideology to be
positive, even joyful.
This does not mean that the notion of ideology as performative it isn’t useful, however. It
is through the view of the performativity of the language of ideology that we can reconcile
the epistemological and sociological approaches to ideology, as well as synthesise
Eagleton’s and Laclau’s arguments about the desirability of retaining ‘ideology’ as an
analytical construct. Laclau begins his ‘resurrection’ of ideology through a re-examination
of Althusser. As we have seen, in Laclau’s reading, it is not the individual that is called into
being (interpellated) through ideology and its narrative expression in political myth, but
society itself.
55
If we recognise that political myth is performative, that its function/existence is due to the
creation of (impossible) society, it then becomes possible to recognise the manner in which
historians like Grittner fall into the contradiction described above. While recognising on
the one hand the symbolic and metaphorical function of myth, they nonetheless at the
same time also reify its symbolic content. That is, they have attempted to find out how
many innocent young white women were kidnapped or lured by foreigners to be
prostitutes. In so doing they have taken the symbolic and metaphorical figures of myth –
'the innocent virgin' the 'evil foreigner’ – and attempted to turn them into real, existing,
flesh and blood people whose numbers can be counted. It is only after the move is made
from symbolic to literal truth, from descriptive to emotive or conative language, from
constative to performative language, that myth can be seen as the sort of statement
deserving of empirical enquiry. There is thus already a mechanism of legitimation, of
naturalisation, at work: a mechanism that conceals its own workings in the process. This
process is a key to myth's believability and hence its power. It is, as Barthes (1973)
famously argued, through naturalisation that myth maintains its hold. Or, as Frank
Kermode observes 'myths have mistaken their symbolic worlds for literal ones and so
come to naturalize their own status' (Kermode 1969 [2000] in Eagleton 1991: 91).
Dealing with myth
It is precisely this mythical trap that I set out to avoid in researching this dissertation. This
is why I have not chosen to ‘expose’ the myth of trafficking though research that would
‘prove’ that the claims of anti-trafficking advocates are exaggerated or distorted. First,
because to do so would mean making precisely the same error as the white slavery
historians. It would mean, on the one hand, attempting to investigate myth, and on the
other, allowing the myth to dictate the terms of my research. Second, because this is not
simply a question of methodological consistency, I believe that to search for ‘hard’
numbers about trafficked women without a deep understanding of the source and power
of the political myths that inspired current concerns, will have devastating real life
consequences for sex workers and migrants. Thirdly, there is the issue of ‘taking symbolic
worlds for literal ones’ as Kermode writes (above). To research the ‘facts’ in order to
separate the myth from the truth would mean being seduced by the slippery power of
myth, to be fooled by its appearance as a description of reality. The ironic power of myth
of trafficking is that in attempting to lift the mask through exposure of the ‘facts’, it only
settles firmer. The face appears to be the true face, but as Laclau demonstrates, there is no
56
‘true face’, only the impossible but necessary space enacted by ideology and sutured by
myth. The myth of trafficking persuades us that we are on the right course: we investigate
the facts, denounce the distortions and triumphantly claim that the myth of trafficking is
no more – exposed to the harsh light of truth. Yet, our every step has been at the behest of
myth. We imagine ourselves free from trafficking at the moment we are most captured by
it.
In the age of statistics, as Connelly notes, old myths are given new validity through use of
statistics to prove them. Those who believe in the myth attempt to lend it scientific validity
(necessary in this scientific age), but so do those who attempt to scientifically disprove it.
They thus accept the validity of the epistemological pretensions of the proponents, even
while they may dispute their findings. Connelly (1980) remarks that it is not the statistics on
white slavery themselves that are so interesting, but rather the question of why it was
thought they were necessary. The same question goes for those historians (and for us
today) who attempt to win a war on the terrain of myth, metaphor and morality with the
inappropriate weaponry of positivist science. It reflects a lurking belief in the ability of
science – statistics – to illuminate 'reality' and dispel the darkness of unscientific, irrational,
beliefs. As Zizek explains Michel Pecheux’s interpretation of Althusser: one of the
fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to self-evidence – ‘Look, you can see
for yourself how things are!… “Let the facts speak for themselves” is perhaps the archstatement of ideology – the point being, precisely, that facts never speak for themselves but
are always made to speak by a network of discursive devises (Zizek 1994: 11, emphasis in
original).36
36
Perhaps a clear way to illustrate this mechanism is to take a myth/ideology which has already widely been
discredited: that of racial inferiority. Leonard Thompson's (1985) work on the myths of apartheid provides an
example of the dangers of slipperiness. While disagreeing with the notion of history as 'objective fact',
recognising the value-laden nature of historical enquiry, Thompson nonetheless argues that myth’s ‘historical
truth’ and ‘scientific probability’ are two criteria by which it should be judged. What are the consequences of
this move for Thompson’s analysis? Few today would argue that the notions of racial inferiority are a fit
subject to be proved or disproved through historical fact-finding or scientific investigation. The statement
‘Blacks are less intelligent than whites’ appears to be a description of reality and thus appears to be a
statement that can be proved or disproved by empirical evidence/scientific enquiry. These sorts of statements
are now widely seen as expressions of racism (a racist ideology), or a prime example of Eagleton’s description:
‘it is fundamentally a matter of fearing and denouncing, reverencing and reviling, all of which then sometimes
gets coded into a discourse which looks as though it is describing the way things actually are’ (Eagleton 1991:
19). Thus opponents of racism do not attempt to ‘prove’ scientifically that blacks are as intelligent as whites,
for this would give a spurious sheen of legitimacy to the claim in the first place. The trick is to uncover the
ways in which racism gets coded into scientific language. Yet, because Thompson fails to recognise this, he
ascribes to science (quite bizarrely) the leading role in conquering ‘false myths’ about race: describing the
demise of ‘scientific racism’ he says:
57
The task I have set myself is to identify the mechanisms through which the myth of
trafficking purports to be a description of reality. I argue that it is not possible to make an
ultimate, sure, incontestable pronouncement on the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of any trafficking
story, analysis or statistic. One can only explain how they came about, what they are based
on, and their link to ideology; examine the political and social context in which they occur
and finally examine their links to political power struggles. The way to do this is not
through a comparison with the ‘facts’, but from a careful analysis of the mythical narrative
itself, and within its social and political context, most importantly, its connections to
power.
I argue that narratives of trafficking in women, like those of white slavery, appear to be
descriptions of reality, but are actually mythical narratives closely bound up with ideologies
concerning sexuality, race and the state. If this is so, it follows that the questions such as
‘did white slavery exist?’, ‘does trafficking in women exist?’, and ‘how much trafficking is
there?’ are not questions that can simply be answered through empirical investigation. What
is required is an examination of the context in which statements about trafficking are made,
and investigation into the ‘slipperiness’ of the debate on trafficking that masks profoundly
normative views with the neutral language of fact, description and statistics, and an
excursion into the historical shapings of the meaning of trafficking in women.
Myth and its political effects
If myth is not to be judged on the basis of its truth or falsehood, then how are we to
evaluate myth? There is a problem with jettisoning critical appraisal because of a reluctance
to pronounce on ‘truth’. The neutral or sociological approach does not seem to allow for
criteria for judging myth – if all myth is ‘lived belief’, and if, in any case, all forms of
thought are ‘socially conditioned’, who is to say whether any given myth is right or wrong,
bad or good? Does a non-evaluative concept of myth lead inevitably to relativism?37
the shift in scientific opinion was not easily translated into non-scientific language, nor was it
readily injected into the popular consciousness, where deep-rooted racial prejudices gave ground at
a much slower rate…Time lags always exist between the findings of specialists and their
incorporation in the basic knowledge of the general public…however, with laws, political rhetoric,
newspapers, radio and television programs and school and college textbooks abandoning racism,
on balance the Western mentality has been moving in the direction pioneered by the scientists’ (pp.
16-17).
37 The idea that a non-evaluative study of ideology is relativistic has been called ‘Mannheim’s paradox’ after
Karl Mannheim (1936). Mannheim took a historicist approach to ideology, rejecting the idea that there
58
To solve this dilemma, Eagleton advocates a position of ‘moral realism’. He reviews the
arguments that state that judgments of truth cannot be made of ideology, and accepts many
of them, but his unease with ‘post-modern relativism’ and the ‘reformist’ politics he claims
this entails, means he seeks unassailable grounds of ‘truth’ from which to condemn certain
ideologies. Rather than seeking to resolve Mannheim’s paradox by twisting and turning
over the relative epistemic values of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’; a moral realist position
maintains that ‘value judgments’ as well as ‘scientific statements’ can be judged ‘true’ or
‘false’: ‘There are ‘moral facts’ as well as physical ones’ (Eagleton 1991: 17).38 However,
Eagleton offers no guide other than ‘those values which can be held to be definitive of
what it is for human beings in a particular situation to live well’ (p. 21) to judge the ‘truth’
of a moral statement. This offers no answer to relativism, it is simply a restatement of the
notion of values based on eternal truth that relativist/post-modernist arguments opposed
in the first place. More serious than this though, is the question is raises of why it is
necessary to justify our condemnation of something we find politically and morally wrong or
unjust by calling it untrue.
This question is particularly relevant for a study of the myth of trafficking, with feminist
claims to telling the ‘real’ story about trafficking backed with statistics and real-life stories.
Wendy Brown (1995), in States of Injury, casts a critical eye on feminist attempts to present
feminist arguments based on ‘women’s experience’ as truth. According to Brown, certain
types of feminism prefer:
Truth (unchanging, uncontestable) over politics (flux, contest, instability)…This
particular modernist reaction to postmodernism makes sense if we recall that the
promise of the Enlightenment was a revision of the old Platonic promise to put an
end to politics by supplanting it with Truth… Modernity could not make good on
this promise, of course, but modernists do not surrender the dream it instilled of a
world governed by reason divested of power. Feminist modernists are no
exception (p. 44).
existed timeless, eternally true concepts, instead viewing all thought as historically conditioned. His selfreflexive theory of ideology subjected all thought, including his own, to ideological analysis, and so, according
to some commentators, leads to a radical relativism
38 Others have attempted to judge the ‘truth’ of ideology in ways that do not engage with epistemic issues.
For example, Raymond Guess argues that a body of ideas may be functionally and/or genetically false as well
as epistemically false. A body of ideas may be false because it ‘incorporates beliefs which are false, or because
it functions in a reprehensible way, or because it has a tainted origin’ (quoted in Eagleton: 25). Eagleton is
uncritical of these attempts, in keeping with what he sees as a radical commitment to socialist truth. Others,
however, have been more critical. For example, Mannheim rejected the idea of what he termed the ‘genetic
fallacy’, ‘the deduction of the validity of an idea directly from its origins’ (MacLellen 1995: 38).
59
The dangers, as Brown sees it, of the ‘Platonic strategy for legitimising “our truth” through
its relation to worldly powerlessness, and discrediting “theirs” through its connection to
power’ (p. 46) is that feminism becomes invested in powerlessness. This leads to a politics
that seeks protection from the state rather than power for itself. As Brown (and others)
have pointed out, state ‘protection’ for women often comes at the cost of limitations on
freedom.
As Laclau reminds us, ideology and hence myth are not only unavoidable, they are
necessary. Rather than arguing that ‘myths’ of trafficking need to be replaced with the truth
about ‘what is really happening’, I suggest that it may be necessary to replace old myths
with new ones. The concluding chapter of this thesis begins to sketch out what a new myth
might look like. In the following two chapters, I set the context for an examination of
‘trafficking in women’ as myth through exploring the ways in which ideological
suppositions concerning class, race, empire, and sexuality informed the myth of white
slavery. Chapter Three focuses on the myth of white slavery as it appeared in Great Britain,
and examines how the narrative form of the white slavery myth contributed to its
believability. Similar narrative structures feature in accounts of trafficking in women, and
this genealogical exploration is intended to establish a framework for understanding
trafficking in women narratives.
60
Chapter Three: The construction of innocence and the spectre of chaos
In Chapter One, we saw some examples of the ways in which contemporary accounts of
trafficking tell their tales. A key theme is the loss of innocence – innocence being an initial
state which needs to be narratively established in order for its subsequent loss to have
dramatic impact on the reader.39 A variety of rhetorical devices are used to signify
innocence: the repetition of key phrases such as ‘naïve’ and ‘innocent’, the invocation of
iconic indicators of youth such as dolls and teddy bears, the lingering descriptions of fresh
youthful beauty, and the pitiful descriptions of poverty. These devises serve a moral as well
as a dramatic function, marking the line between good and bad women – for the
assumption of the innocence of prostitutes is anything but a given. As a delegate to a
conference in Budapest exclaimed: ‘How can I distinguish an innocent victim from a sex
worker?’ (quoted in Wijers 1998: 11).40
In historian’s accounts of white slavery, the white slave as the ‘beautiful victim’ (Haag 1999:
65) is well-illuminated. Connelly (1980), for example, focuses his analysis on the image of
the white slave as a victim, representing in her ruined innocence the real and imagined loss
of American rural innocence. Many of the devices used today to establish innocence in
accounts of trafficking (written, spoken, drawn, and filmed) are echoes of those used to
create the dramatis personae of the white slave. This chapter examines these narrative devices,
focusing on the work of two key figures in the fight against white slavery: William T. Stead
and Josephine Butler.41 Recalling the trafficking stories in chapter two, though, we note
39
A literary echo of campaigning journalist WT Stead’s (1885) attempts at literal establishment (through
doctor’s examination) of the virginity of the ‘maidens’ that he ‘bought’ in his undercover investigation of
white slavery, discussed later in the chapter.
40 Transnational Training Seminar on Trafficking in Women, June 20-24, Budapest
41 While choosing to focus on these two was obvious, considering their importance, my decision was also
influenced by Walkowitz who, in the The City of Dreadful Delight (1995), contrasts Stead’s and Butler’s
narratives on white slavery. The influence of this wonderful book on my own analysis extents beyond the
choice of central figures, as the main text of this chapter makes clear. Walkowitz also examines the narrative
structures and strategies of Stead’s text The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon (1885). Her main concern is with
the production of meanings around sexual danger, and how these meanings ‘ordered people’s experience and
helped to construct a sexual subjectivity for men and women’ (p. 83). As the title indicates, the city as symbol
of/metaphor for sexual danger is central to her analysis. The city had enormous symbolic resonance in white
slavery narratives in every country, and its symbolic power is also a feature of contemporary trafficking tales.
The city as a metaphor of danger and corruption will be looked at in more detail in Chapter Five.
While The City of Dreadful Delight is not expressly a look at myth, Walkowitz’s rich deconstruction of key
narratives of white slavery in Britain is, in effect, the deconstruction of a myth. Walkowitz views ‘narrative’
fairly narrowly as a particular arrangement of written expression. Her purpose in focusing on narrative, as
she explains it, is ‘to explore how cultural meanings around sexual danger were produced and disseminated in
61
that the linguistic creation of innocence isn’t the only narrative sleight-of-hand at work. In
the story from Nigeria, for example, the innocent girl is changed into the threatening
harlot. This telling too, is genealogically linked to white slavery narratives. If innocence was
a constantly reoccurring theme in narratives about white slavery, this was complicated by
the presence of the image of the prostitute as ruiner, herself the destroyer of innocence.42 It
is no surprise that the magic word that performs the transformation is consent.
An investigation into these two mythical figures – the white slave and the ‘destructive
whore’ – forms the heart of this chapter’s analysis. That said, I’d like to take a brief
methodological pause. The moral urge to distinguish between good and bad women on the
basis of sexual virtue – the ‘madonna/whore’ dualism– is now such a familiar idea that it
has achieved the status of a truism: to invoke it as the basis of an analysis can run the risk
of banality, of taking the argument down well-trodden paths; a comfortable walk, but with
no surprises along the way.43 Yet it is impossible to ignore the familiar dichotomy when
researching white slavery and trafficking, for it jumps off the pages. The challenge for the
researcher is to find a way to make the whore/madonna dichotomy fresh, to sharpen the
analytical edge dulled by over-familiarity.
One way to do this is to apply Haag’s (1999) insights about the socially situated nature of
consent to investigate how the categories of madonna/whore were constructed. This
means not taking the notion of consent as a given, through either anachronistically
projecting our ideas of consent into the past or even through a more historically conscious
effort to discover what consent ‘meant’ to the late Victorians. Rather, it means investigating
the ways in which consent came to mean what it did. Thus, in this case, not only how the
representation and political/legal personae of the white slave was established through
consent, but also how narratives of white slavery themselves modified other social
relations, such as those of class and those implicated in Empire.
Victorian society, and what were their cultural and political effects’ (p. 83). The Maiden Tribute in Walkowitz’s
analysis is a paradigmatic example of the production of meanings of sexual danger: Stead’s descriptions of the
violation of virgins enabling the readers to thrill with pleasurable horror at the same time as they righteously
denounced the evil of white slavery.
42 Haveman (1998) analyses the case of the Netherlands, where the political fight around white slavery was
also a constant tension between the two images.
43 The problem of loss of analytical edge is of course wider than the understanding of the ‘madonna/whore’
dichotomy, and is a feature of much contemporary social analysis which has domesticated the (revolutionary)
implications of ‘post’ (structuralism, modernism, colonial) theory. Binaries, dichotomies, discourses, and
‘Others’, a litany familiar to students all over (and invoked with as much reverence and as little understanding
as church liturgy) are now on the cusp of becoming as quaint as ‘false consciousness’ and ‘the proletariat’.
62
The two caricatures of melodrama were the result of the particular historical social/political
moment, of the way heterosexual consent was being constructed and understood.
Social/political movements such as second-wing feminism and socialism, the political
realities of empire, and new medical/scientific learning shaped the discursive landscape in
which consent was constructed. In all of this, the prostitute took a central place as the
public symbol (public woman) of the price to pay for getting consent wrong. This is
enormously important for a study of trafficking, given that the innocent victim and the
destructive whore are the central figures in both popular perception of trafficking and in
policy response. Contemporary discourses of trafficking have performed a macabre
‘zombie magic’, rousing the corpses of the Victorian imagination from their well-deserved
rest. Genealogy as necromancy – the myth of white slavery has been exhumed, worm-eaten
and whiffy, to clumsily stalk the living.
Narrative and truth
Before I examine the constructions of consent in white slavery in Britain, I will look in
more detail at a term which I have, until now, used without definition or elaboration:
narrative.44 ‘Narrative’ as a focal point of investigation has been immensely influential
across a wide range of disciplines as part of the linguistic turn in post-modernism. The
influence of linguistics on modern myth study cannot be overstated. From Levi-Strauss’s
(1978; 1968) semiotic structuralism through Barthes’ (1973) both playful and highly
formalised Saussurian (1959 [1974]) schema of myth to contemporary theorists of political
myth such as Flood (1996), the study of myth has been the study of the way myth is told:
myth is its narrative. An examination of the construction of ‘myths of sexuality’ (Nead
1988) through narrative allows us to revisit and re-evaluate the connections between myth
and ideology that were introduced in the preceding chapter, as well as a way to put a
perspective on the political consequences of the myth of white slavery/trafficking.
The study of myth and the study of narrative, as indicated above, are historically/
theoretically connected. The study of the narrative structure of myth was introduced by
Propp in his highly influential study of Russian folktales Morphology of the Folktale (1928
[1968]). Barthes’ Mythologies (1973) famously follows in the same vein. In this work, the
analysis of linguistic structure is applied to everyday cultural production, like advertising,
44
A term that without careful handling can end up in the litany with ‘dichotomy’ etc. See footnote 44, above.
63
stripping and wrestling. Using a Saussurian structuralist analysis, Barthes wrested the
notion of myth away from its traditional connection with ‘primitive’ or ancient cultures to
show how myths operate in sustaining relations of domination through the regulation and
production of meaning in modern political cultures. Barthes argues that myths support
bourgeois hegemony by naturalising what is contingent and historically produced into that
which is timeless. Nead (1988) uses a Barthian perspective to argue that ‘the image of the
prostitute as helpless victim’ was a ‘dominant myth’ in Mid-Victorian Britain, ‘implicated in
the preservation of middle-class hegemony. The myth, conveyed through the narrative of
the ‘temptation-fall-decline’ of the prostitute, made this sequence seem natural, inevitable,
and true (p. 141).
Following historians Walkowitz and Nead, we can argue that the narrative aspect of myth
of white slavery appears, not simply as convenient or contingent, but as an essential
element of its meaning-making: ‘Narrative, then, was fundamental to the effectiveness of
the myth of the life and death of the prostitute…Its sequence was seen as the unveiling of
reality, the revolution of truth’ (Nead 1988: 141). Walkowitz explicitly concentrates on the
narrative form of prostitution myths, while Nead’s work is concerned primarily with visual
images of the prostitute. However, though ‘narrative’ is the concept which explains for
Nead the persistence and power of the myth of the prostitute’s decline and fall, she does
not explain how narrative is related to, or expressed in other, non-literary forms. This
brings us to the question of whether narrative is necessarily an element of myth.
The question of political myth’s relationship to narrative is a central question in myth
scholarship. Scholars of myth do not agree on the question; for those such as Sauvy, ‘it is
the beliefs themselves, abstracted from their discursive expression, which constitute the
myths’ (Flood 1996: 101). I align myself with those such as Tudor (1972) and Flood (1996)
who argue that narrative is essential to myth. If myth is to retain any significance as an
analytical concept, it must express something that other concepts can and do not. As Flood
(1996) argues, ‘without reference to discursive form [narrative], the myth becomes little
more than a synonym for ideological belief’ (p. 102).45 Myth is able to pack an analytical
punch precisely because it expresses the powerful synthesis of deeply held beliefs with the
45
Flood (1996) maintains that not every ‘given discourse’ in which a political myth plays is necessarily
‘predominantly narrative in form or function…A book can consist of chapters which are largely in the form
of argument and description, while the sequencing of some or all of the chapters follow a chronological order
giving a narrative dimension to the text’ (p.125).
64
specific form which the articulation of those beliefs assumes. Thus an understanding of
narrative is key to the understanding of the political effects of myth. Narrative is not
synonymous with ideology, yet it has a necessary relationship to it, examined below.
What about words or phrases and visual images? Can these be myths as well? Flood (1996)
argues that myth can also be condensed into a sentence or a phrase as well as embodied in
visual images. While an image or phrase may not be in itself a myth, it may have ‘the
capacity to evoke a myth …. a photograph, a painting, a piece of sculpture, a carving , a
cartoon, a poster, a mosaic, a collage, among other things, can all represent an established
political myth or a set of myths by a form of synecdoche-part for the whole’ (p.166,167). I
interpret this to mean that something can be mythical without necessarily appearing in the
traditional narrative form of a written or spoken story with a beginning, middle and an end.
This ‘broad’ interpretation of narrative is not far from that set out by Barthes in his later
work: ‘Contemporary myth is discontinuous. It is no longer expressed in long fixed
narratives but only in ‘discourse’; at most it is a phraseology, a corpus of phrases (or
stereotypes); myth disappears, but leaving-so much the more insidious-the mythical’ (Barthes
1984 [1971] in Flood 1996: 167, emphasis in original). (It should be clear, however, that
Flood [and I] do not agree with Barthes that the narrative form of myth has been wholly
supplanted). The whole thrust of Barthes’ method – which was part of great project of
structuralism – was that structural analysis did not have to be limited to the study of
language (Torfing 1999). Therefore, for Barthes, myth did not have to take the form of
language. Insofar as a mythical object/instance conveyed mythical meaning it could be
considered as speech: ‘a photograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as a
newspaper article, even objects will become speech, if they mean something’ (Barthes 1973: 111,
emphasis added).46
Including visual and truncated narrative forms is essential for the study of white slavery and
trafficking as myth. White slavery, as is shown primarily by Nead (1988), but also by other
historians such as Grittner (1990) and Connolly (1980), was narrated not only in a great
variety of written forms – plays, fiction, government reports, memoirs, newspaper reports
– but also in non-written forms – paintings, photographs, cartoons, and sculpture.
46
Flood uses this quote from Barthes to illustrate his argument that narrative as such was not a consideration
for Barthes. Yet he misses the point that for Barthes, this was precisely because ‘any image, object or verbal
message’ (Flood p.165) had the same semiotic structure when used as myth, making the isolation of the
‘narrative’ aspect unnecessary.
65
Synecdoche was at work when the statue of ‘The White Slave’ (photo in Grittner 1990) – a
nearly-nude woman in chains – was understood by the vast numbers who viewed her to
represent the entire sequence of the fall of innocence. The contemporary manifestations of
the myth are equally varied. Some of the most potent synecdochal effects are achieved by
the posters made to accompany information campaigns about trafficking. A particularly
notorious example is a poster produced by IOM Lithuania in 2002 (at www.iom.org).47 It is
a digitally-manipulated photo, showing an attractive young woman with barbed hooks
imbedded deep in her naked flesh. These hooks are attached to strings which are
manipulated by a giant hand at the top of the poster. This poster powerfully narrates the
myth in a single static image.
What can we now initially postulate about the relationship between narrative, myth and
ideology in white slavery and trafficking? The myth of white slavery/trafficking, the story
of innocence lured, innocence betrayed, and innocence destroyed, is implied and evoked in
a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic forms, including law, paintings, film, and sculpture.
Through narrative, the myth of white slavery/trafficking takes on the appearance of reality
‘narrative is, as it were, the transformation of representation into ‘Reality’, the
demonstrating of its truth, the discovery of its meaning…The effect of narrative is exactly
that of tightening, action is moulded in a destiny, an inevitable coherence of the real’ (Heath
1982 in Nead 1998: 140). Narratives are stories: in their straightforward representation of a
series of events, they work to give coherence to contradictory reality, to give closure. As the
quote from Heath indicates, not only did the narrative make the fate of the white slave
appear believable, it made it seem inevitable. Narrative achieves closure by ‘leaving the
audience with an implicit or explicit assurance that what was to be shown has indeed been
shown’ (Flood 1996: 115). The mythical operation identified by Barthes consists of
naturalisation of the historically contingent: ‘myth has been one of the means by which the
bourgeoisie has sought to convey the illusion…that the interests of their class are identical
with the interests of all and the values of their class are self-evidently right for all’ (Flood
1996: 164). This naturalisation is the ideological move – ‘the ‘naturalisation’ of the symbolic
47
This poster caused much discussion on the NSWP list. The NSWP coordinator wrote to IOM in protest,
and NSWP member Empower Bangkok produced a satirical cartoon based on the poster. The IOM
responded with a defense of the poster, arguing that its ‘shocking’ nature was necessary to make people aware
of the true nature of trafficking.
66
order – that is, as the perception that reifies the results of discursive procedures into
properties of the ‘thing itself’ (Zizek 1994: 85).
In Chapter One, I argued that ideology was able to achieve its political effects because it
appeared to be a description of reality – a representation of the real. Barthes argues that myth
‘works’ because it appears denotive while being actually connotive. Narrative instigates the
performativity of ideology as it is played through myth: it makes it seem real.
The white slave (appearances and apparitions)
The campaign against white slavery in the United Kingdom formed part of a wave of what
historian Connelly (1990) terms an ‘anti-prostitution’ sentiment throughout the then
‘Western’ world during the mid to late 19th century. While concern with prostitution was
certainly not new to this period, there was a distinct break with the way that prostitution
was conceived. Foucault (1976 [1981]) famously argued that sexuality for the Victorians, far
from being repressed, was being constantly produced, and that the production of
sexualities was a privileged site for the production of selves.48 Onto the stage already set
with the frenzied production and dissemination of images of the ‘deviant’ sexuality of the
prostitute appeared the iconic image of the white slave. Her appearance at the end of the
19th century was heralded by the unprecedented migration of women (working-class) from
the country-side to the city, from colonial powers to colonised countries, and from
Southern Europe and Asia to the US (Guy 1991; Bristow 1977). The increase in female
migration was accompanied by other changes that historians have pointed to as indicative
of a ‘crisis’ in Euro-American society in the decades bounding the turn of the century.
These changes (including urbanisation and the increased politicisation of the working class)
were initiated by the industrial revolution, but gained pace rapidly as the century drew to a
close.
48
The notion of ‘the body’ as an important site of study (other than medical) has been immensely productive
in cultural studies, queer, feminist, post-colonial theory. For a study of prostitution, of course ‘the body’
springs immediately to mind. On the face of it, the concern with prostitution in Europe and the United States
marks the break between Victorian ‘repression’ and the ‘modern’, open approach to sexuality which Foucault
(1976 [1981]) contests. Many historians continue to follow this ‘end of repression’ approach, showing how
the campaign against white slavery, especially women’s involvement with it, helped initiate the new era of
sexual openness. While I agree with the Foucaultian interpretation, it is nonetheless so that feminists and
social hygienists themselves experienced and described their willingness to discuss prostitution in public as
breaking of silence and an overcoming of shame (Walkowitz 1980).
67
Connelly argues that in the United States, anti-prostitution was intricately connected with
fears and anxieties produced by Progressive-era social changes such as demise of the smalltown rural way of life and increased immigration:
As a form of illicit sexual behaviour, prostitution has always provoked highly charged
emotions. During the progressive years, however, its inherent capacity to provoke fear and
alarm was greatly expanded. Prostitution became a master symbol, a code word, for a wide
range of anxieties engendered by the great social and cultural changes that give the
progressive era its coherence as a distinct historical period (1980: 6).
Connelly’s conception of the prostitute as symbolic of social disorder is also seen by Nead
in mid-Victorian Britain: ‘the prostitute as a figure of contagion, disease and death; a sign
of social disorder and ruin to be feared and controlled’ (1980: 106). Nead argues that this
image of the prostitute co-existed with another, radically different image, that of the
prostitute as ‘passive victim’, who ‘displaced these connotations of power and destruction
and defined the prostitute as a tragic and suffering figure’ (1988: 106).49
Analysing myth
In the following section, I trace the myth of white slavery as it appeared in Great Britain,
In the process, I will make use of the interpretations of the myth by historians of white
slavery. Historians such as Connelly and Grittner (others) who do close readings of the
mythical narratives of white slavery, tend to locate ‘the’ myth of white slavery both
synchronically and diachronically. A synchronic approach used when a single text or image
of white slavery is the subject of analysis. A diachronic approach is used in the comparison
of various texts and images with each other in order to elucidate the core elements of the
myth of white slavery. In Connelly’s case, this method leads to the following
characterisation of the common elements of the myth:
Typically, a chaste and comely native American country girl would forsake her
idyllic country home and family for the promise the city. On the way, or shortly
after arrival, she would fall victim to one of the swarm of panderers lying in wait
for just such an innocent and unprotected sojourner. Using one of his vast variety
of tricks – a promise of marriage, an offer to assist in securing lodging, or if these
were to no avail, the chloroformed cloth, the hypodermic needle, or the drugged
drink – the insidious white slaver would brutally seduce the girl and install her in a
49
Bell (1994) observes, like Nead (1988), contradictions in presentations of the prostitute body but reads
them through Baktin’s notions of the carnivalesque. She stresses that the presented body was multidimensional and contradictory, but still comes up with (nearly) the same ‘master-images’ as Nead (the profane
and the sacred/pleasure aspects of the prostitute): ‘One a ruined, destroyed, victimized body; the other a
destroying body, a disease that spreads and rots the body politic. These images are inversions of one another’
(Bell 1997: 45).
68
brothel, where she became an enslaved prostitute. Within five years she would end
up in potter’s field, unless she had the good fortune to be “rescued” by a member
of one of the dedicated groups fighting white slavery (1990: 116).
Elements of this story – and its form as narrative – were not only as Connelly indicates,
uniform throughout America, but strikingly similar as well in Britain and the Continent.50
The ‘simple melodramatic formula’ of white slavery is an old and easily recounted tale of
innocence destroyed. The ‘bare bones’ of the story are so universal, and the archetypes of
the innocent victim and the evil villain so prevalent, that in themselves they have no
meaning. Attempts to find the meaning of white slavery in a reductionist search for these
figures are misguided. These cardboard cut-outs do not have any meaning in themselves, it is
exactly because of their emptiness that they can carry meaning. It is through their
inscription that meaning is made, and this inscription should be the focus of study. This
position is derived from Laclau, whose ‘main theoretical result’ as summarised by Zizek
(1994) is ‘that meaning does not inhere in elements of an ideology as such – these elements,
rather, function as ‘free-floating signifiers’ whose meaning is fixed by the mode of their
hegemonic articulation (p. 12).51
My discussion of the narratives of white slavery, drawing as it does on the work of these
historians, will proceed diachronically, bringing together the work of white slavery
historians with different emphasises and historical foci.52 The method is thus diachronic,
with the following caveats: my attempt should not be taken as a Straussian attempt to find
‘deep structures’ within the myth, common elements in which the true meaning of the
myth is to be found. The difference with a Straussian analysis is that I do not see variations
and absences as accidental and irrelevant, but precisely where the search for meaning
50
Men were not considered victims of the ‘white slave trade’, though the US Immigration Commission
Report of 1909 (U.S. Senate 1909) noted that young men were being imported from Europe for ‘unnatural
practices’. This was a reference to the supposed European perversion of homosexuality and the threat of its
importation to the US (Grittner 1990). In today’s discourse on trafficking in women, very little mention is
made of men being trafficked. Campaigns that focus specifically on child prostitution, in contrast, often
highlight the presence of boys, reflecting an anti-gay bias.
51 The term ‘free floating signifier’ comes from linguistics. Laclau uses the example of ‘democracy’ to explain
his usage of the term: ‘a signifier like ‘democracy’ is essentially ambiguous by dint of its widespread political
circulation: it acquires one possible meaning when articulated with ‘anti-fascism’ and a completely different
one when articulated with ‘anti-communism’ (1990: 28).
52 Doty (2000) explains the difference between a synchronic and a diachronic approach as follows: ‘Attention
to a specific text of whatever nature, by whatever method, is synchronic or symtagmatic, whereas genre
criticism of a body of texts, or comparative motif criticism, is paradigmatic or diachronic. Any one text that
presents a number of actors or situations, however, may need to be analyzed with both dimensions in mind’
(p. 281).
69
should start.53 Similarly, while Barthes’ analysis of myth is useful and provocative, it is
limited by his structuralism; in moving the linguistic analysis up to the ‘second-order signs’
of myth, he maintains the link, the necessary relationship, between the signifier and the
signified. This link, in structuralist thinking, provides the meaning of the sign. Myth is itself
closure for Barthes, its meaning complete and contained in its structure. In the insights of
later deconstructionists, in particular Derrida (1967 [1977]), this closure itself is recognised
as an impossibility (Laclau 1997). Thompson (1984), discussing Barthes’s method,
comments that while an analysis of ‘structural features and systemic elements’ is useful, it is
also limited, ‘meaning is never exhausted by these features and elements’ (p.143). The
meaning of the myth of white slavery also has to be looked for in terms of its ‘constitutive
outside’ (Derrida 1967 [1977]). Closure, is also, as examined in the previous chapter, exactly
that which ideology attempts, but is never able to achieve (Laclau 1997).
If myth can be seen as an attempt to fix the meaning of white slavery, with the narrative
form providing closure; the proper method of analysis is one that exposes the attempts at
closure rather than one that takes its meaning at face value. This approach attempts to
show that the meaning of white slavery, in its varying socio-political settings, was a matter
of what was left out: it analyses the ways in which the presence of the chaos bringer
prevented a final, stable, meaning of white slavery. This deconstructive approach has been
described by Besley as efforts to:
seek not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible
meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe,
and above all its contradictions. In its absences, and in the collisions between its
divergent meanings, the text implicitly criticizes its own ideology; it contains within
itself the critique of its own values (Besley in Doty 2000: 441).
I employ this approach to the myths of white slavery and trafficking. I focus my attention
to the ways that cultural and political productions of white slavery and of trafficking are
always partial and contested. A recognition that the myth of white slavery/trafficking never
‘exhausts’ the meanings of prostitution, that the narratives contain, include, depend on, the
spectre of chaos (rather than simply supplanting it, banishing it to the margins) leads us to
investigate the manner in which the absences which constructed the meaning of the white
53
Doty notes that Strauss’s structuralism was predominantly concerned with ‘the mythical structures of
society rather than with clarification or appreciation of actual narratives themselves…in terms of their
immediate semantic significance within the societies producing the myths or rituals’ (2000: 283).
70
slave/trafficking victim image shaped the politics of white slavery and contemporary antitrafficking politics.
I begin my analysis in Great Britain because this is where the ‘moral panic’ of white slavery
began. The start of the campaign against white slavery, and the appearance of the first
white slavery narratives, was in Great Britain in the 1880s. Reports of British girls working
in brothels in Belgium aroused concern in religious, official and feminist circles.54 It took
the publication of one extremely sensationalist narrative, however, to spark a full-blown
moral panic: Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). I follow the emergence of
the campaign against white slavery in Great Britain to examine the construction of the
white slave through the attempted exclusion of her ever-present evil twin.
The campaign against white slavery in Great Britain evolved against a background of
intense societal concern about prostitution (Nead 1988). Feminists, religious groups,
medical professionals, journalists, policy and lawmakers, all weighed in with their
contributions as to how prostitution should be defined, what caused it, what its effects
were, and what should be done about it (Bland 1992; Walkowitz 1980; Nead 1988).
The construction of deviance and the push for regulation
Feminist historians of Victorian prostitution such as Linda Nead, Judith Walkowitz, Lucy
Bland, and Antoinette Burton use a Foucaultian perspective to show the ways in which the
category ‘prostitute’ was a flexible one, able to accommodate shifting notions of sexuality
as well as those of class, gender and race. Nead’s (1988) analysis of artistic representations
of prostitution in Victorian Britain argues that the construction of sexuality through
discourses of prostitution was an essential element of middle-class hegemony:
‘prostitute’ is an historical construction which works to define and categorize a
particular groups of women in terms of sex and class. The term should not be seen as an
objective description of an already-determined group; rather, it actively constitutes a group which is
both socially and economically specific. In the nineteenth century this process of
categorization was produced through various social practices, through legal and
medical discourses, religious and cultural forms (p.94, emphasis added).
The mid 19th century high-point of this process of categorisation was the Contagious
Diseases Acts: a legal codification of the prostitute that owed much to the newly acquired
54
Historians attribute the first report of white slavery to Alfred Dyer in 1880, a social purity campaigner
whose ‘exposure’ of the presence of English women in brothels in Belgium led to a Parliamentary enquiry
(Roberts 1992).
71
prestige of medical discourse (Foucault 1969, Walkowitz 1980, Nead 1988). The Acts
represented a moment in which one particular image of prostitution was ‘fixed’ in the law;
a momentary victory of the construction of the prostitute as bringer of chaos; as a conduit
which transmitted disease and death to society. The Acts acted as a catalyst for the
organisation of a feminist-led campaign which sought to replace this image with that of the
prostitute-victim (Walkowitz 1996). The fallout from the campaign against the Acts shaped
the political and discursive framework for the emergence of white slavery (Irwin 1996).
Under the Contagious Diseases Acts, prostitutes found infected with a ‘social disease’
could be detained by the police and forced to undergo an internal medical examination. If
found infected, they were interned in so-called ‘lock hospitals’: ‘pseudo-medical prisons for
whores’ (Roberts 1992: 248). Of the many arguments used to garner support for the Acts,
one of the most successful was that of the need to protect British troops from the syphilis
spread (it was assumed) by working-class prostitutes (Walkowitz 1980). As such, the Acts
did not in any way attempt to regulate prostitution that occurred out of the public eye, and
identified the sexually active bodies of working class women as the threat that state-power
backed medical science needed to contain (Walkowitz 1980, Bland 1992).
The resurrection of female innocence and the repeal campaign
The Acts aroused intense opposition, the fiercest of which was led by Josephine Butler.
These feminist ‘abolitionists’ opposed the regulationist views of the prostitute as sexually
deviant and prostitution as a necessary evil.55 They located the causes of prostitution not in
the pathology of the individual prostitute, but in the twin evils of working-class female
poverty and male lust. Abolitionism, though condemned by today’s sex worker rights
advocates (including myself in earlier work, for example Doezema 1998) for denying
women’s ‘agency’, was a movement whose political vision (if not its effects) cannot be
simply dismissed as repressive. As Burton (1995) notes, abolitionism, like much of 2nd wave
feminism (Burton 1994; Smith-Rosenberg 1985), sought emancipation for women through
freedom from male sexual double standards. However, this freedom went hand-in-hand
with the impulse to control women who did not live up to the high moral standards set by
their sisters. This impulse informs much of today’s feminist reaction to prostitution, as the
next chapter demonstrates.
55
The name ‘abolitionist’ was adopted by anti-prostitution campaigners from anti-slavery campaigns (Irwin
1996).
72
In the abolitionist version of the plight of the prostitute, it is the victim image that comes
to the fore.56 First, the prostitute was portrayed as victimised because of her sex. The
sexual binary that informed Butlerite feminism did not substantially differ from that
underlying regulationist arguments: the sexually active male on one side and the sexually
passive female on the other. The emancipatory difference was present in their interrogation
of the arguments used to justify regulation and in their linking of the control of prostitutes
to the condition of all women (Walkowitz 1980). They argued that a regulationist system
created a class of women who were to be used by men, who then justified this use by
blaming the women: first as sinful, then as deviant. Prostitutes, argued Butler, were created
and maintained by men: the prostitute herself bore no responsibility for her condition
(Irwin 1996). The abolitionist vision was of a world in which prostitution was completely
ended, where men and women alike clove to a single standard of chastity (except in
marriage). Feminists in Butler’s repeal movement saw the CD Acts as official state
recognition of the ‘double standard’ of sexual behaviour for men and women (Walkowitz
1980).
Second, the prostitute was seen as victimised because of her class (Walkowitz 1980). This
aspect of the argument, too, had its emancipatory as well as anti-emancipatory aspects. On
the one hand, the focus on working class female poverty as a cause of prostitution was a
surprisingly revolutionary attempt to locate prostitution within societal structures. On the
other, middle-class Butlerite feminists shared regulationist assumptions about the class
location of prostitution, focusing their attention on the plight of prostitutes from the
‘poorer classes’ (Walkowitz 1992). While this led them to protest against the way the CD
Acts gave the state additional powers to police and control the lives of working class
women, Walkowitz (1992) notes the ambiguous nature of their reaction: 'As members of
the propertied classes, feminists felt obliged to redress the sexual wrongs done to poor girls
by privileged men, and they often register the same repugnance and ambivalence toward
"incorrigible" girls as they had towards unrepentant prostitutes' (p. 132).
56
The relationship between middle-class Butlerite feminists and their working class victim/heroines was a
complicated one of, on the one hand, identification with female suffering, and on the other, a desire to police
and control less-educated and less-fortunate sisters. Prostitutes who refused to play the role of repentant
victim were an anathema to many of these feminists, see Walkowitz 1980, Bland 1992 and Burton 1994.
73
The feminist abolitionist campaigners were able to construct a broad coalition of social
groups, including working men’s organisations and religious organisations. They were also
joined by the burgeoning ‘social purity’ movement, whose notions of sexual chastity were
more repressive and wider than the original Butlerite agenda (Walkowitz 1980). Prominent
purity campaigner William Coote set up the National Vigilance Association (NVA), that
espoused a repressive moral agenda with a focus on the sexual behaviour of young people
(Coote 1910). The debauchery of innocent children would also form the flashpoint for the
British panic around white slavery, as the NVA took up the cause. This aspect of the antiwhite slavery campaign will strike a familiar chord with contemporary observers, as the
anti-trafficking movement is increasingly being linked to the panic around paedophilia and
child prostitution.
As Grittner remarks, social purity reformers ‘soon discovered the rhetorical power that
“white slavery” had on their middle-class audience’ (Grittner 1990: 41). After the campaign
to repeal the CD Acts achieved its goal in 1886, Butlerite feminists continued to support
the social purist campaign against white slavery, as they believed that the system of licensed
brothels abroad furthered the traffic in women (Walkowitz 1980, Gibson 1986). They also
supported the social purists’ agenda of a single standard of chastity for both sexes and
shared their concern with youthful sexuality (Bristow 1977; Walkowitz 1980). Eventually,
the abolitionist campaign was eclipsed by the campaign for social purity, as the emotive
issue of white slavery succeeded in whipping up public concern to a fever pitch. In other
European countries and the United States as well, feminists initiated, or became involved
in, the drive to abolish prostitution and white slavery. And, as in England, these campaigns
were increasingly dominated by repressive moralists, as alliances were forged with religious
and social purity organisations (M. Gibson 1986; Grittner 1990; Haveman 1998).57
Writing and speaking the white slave
At a rally in Hyde Park in 1885, thousands of people converged to decry the white slave
trade and demand that the age of consent be raised to sixteen. ‘Wagonloads of young
57
The repressive nature of the social purity campaign was recognised and condemned by some feminists of
the time. Theresa Billington-Grieg (1913) published an article in the English Review in 1913 in which she
argued that feminist anti-white slavery activists had ‘provided arms and ammunition for the enemy of
women’s emancipation’ (p. 446). Billington-Grieg undertook an investigation of the white slavery cases
publicised by the purity movement and found them to be unfounded or ‘spun’ beyond recognition. Josephine
Butler publicly condemned the repressive aspects of the social-purity movement, but many of her erstwhile
followers joined the ranks of the social purists (Walkowitz 1980)
74
virgins in white’ waved banners reading ‘The Innocents, Will They Be Slaughtered?’
(Bristow 1977: 113). Feminist campaigners, working-men’s associations, socialists, social
purity activists and clergy joined together to demand that Parliament end the sacrifice of
pure virgins in Britain’s ‘capital of shame’. Hero and instigator of this demonstration was
William T. Stead, a journalist and editor whose weekly, the Pall Mall Gazette, was running a
Stead-penned account of the debauching of young girls by depraved aristocrats in seedy
London dens: The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon (1885). Especially prominent among the
demonstrators were abolitionist feminists active in the National Vigilance Association.
However, by this stage of the campaign against white slavery, their own leader and
inspiration, Josephine Butler, had distanced herself from the more repressive aspects of the
anti-prostitution movement: aspects which both Stead and Butler’s work ironically
enhanced.
Ironically, because the two things that the two titans of Victorian virtue had most in
common was their flair for rhetoric (often sensationalist) and their distrust of the state in
its dealing with prostitutes. Butler wrote widely on prostitution and was renowned as a
passionate and persuasive speaker. Stead was a pioneer of crusading undercover journalism,
and his remarkable expose employs both the sensationalist (tabloid) language of the thenpopular ‘true-crime’ pamphlets (Walkowitz 1996) and the sober (broadsheet) language of
social analysis. Stead’s campaign took as its subject the ‘trade’ in under-age (of consent, 16
years) girls in London for prostitution. Stead’s diatribes against the police, in particular the
last installment of The Maiden Tribute, could serve as a model for sex worker activists
today.58 For example, he writes: ‘To increase by one jot or one tittle the power of the man
in uniform over the women who are left unfriended even by their own sex is a crime
against liberty and justice, which no impatience at markets of vice, or holy horror at the
sight of girls on the streets, ought to be allowed to excuse’ (4: 1).
Walkowitz (1992) contrasts Stead’s reading of the story of white slavery with Josephine
Butler’s accounts of her work among prostitutes. Butler’s analysis of prostitution seems, in
the first instance, to have banished altogether the sexually destructive female aspect of the
58
The potential for contemporary mirrorings of emancipatory white slavery discourses should be investigated
and exploited.
75
prostitute-symbol.59 In Butler’s writings, the criteria by which a prostitute is judged guilty
or innocent of sexual wrongdoing is reduced to her femaleness: simply by virtue of her
gender, the female prostitute was a victim. According to Walkowitz: ‘Feminist propaganda
was severely constrained by a melodramatic vocabulary of female victimization, which
demanded that registered women be innocent victims falsely entrapped into a life of viceinvoluntary actors in their own history, without sexual passion’ (Walkowitz 1992: 92).
Walkowitz writes that Butler, like Stead, cast her narratives in the melodramatic convention
– one that was adopted by her followers in the feminist anti-prostitution and anti-white
slavery movement. However, Butler’s accounts were a ‘feminised’ version of melodrama,
deriving their form from mid-18th century women’s melodramas (Walkowitz 1992). These
‘women’s stories’ allowed women to be heroines as well as, or even instead of, victims.
Walkowitz argues that, like Stead, Butler cast herself in the role of the heroine: the ‘saving
mother’ of female melodrama, rather than the courageous hero that Stead as a crusading
journalist and protector of the weak attempted to be.
Prostitutes were cast in the entirely passive supporting performance as grateful daughters.60
Walkowitz concludes that in Butler’s version of female sexuality, prostitutes were not made
of a different sexual stuff than respectable women. Yet this claimed unity was threatened
by the spectre of unruly female sexuality which for Butlerite feminists was moderated
through keenly felt and observed class distinctions. The figure that interrupted the closure
of Butler’s feminist melodrama had a distinctly class character: ‘They [Butler’s narratives]
assert a unified identity for women….yet they nonetheless reveal a complicated
identification with the fallen woman as both a version of the self and residual Other’
(Walkowitz 1992: 89).
The melodramatic narrative
We do not have to look far to find a connection between myth and melodrama in this
instance: the title Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon itself refers to the Greek myth of the
Minataur, which Stead used to structure his introduction to the series:
This very night in London, and every night, year in and year out, not seven
maidens only, but many times seven, selected almost as much by chance as those
59
Sharp and Jordan have collected Butler’s works in their Diseases of the Body Politic: Josephine Butler and the
Prostitution Campaign (2002).
60 The analysis of Butler’s use of melodrama is from Walkowitz 1992.
76
who in the Athenian market-place drew lots as to which should be flung into the
Cretan labyrinth, will be offered up as the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.
Maidens they were when this morning dawned, but to-night their ruin will be
accomplished, and to-morrow they will find themselves within the portals of the
maze of London brotheldom (1: 1).61
The narrative penned by Stead took the form of a classic melodramatic tale, with elements
from other ‘older’ cultural forms such as ‘the literature of urban exploration’ and ‘newer’
forms such as late-Victorian pornography and fantasy, the Gothic fairy tale and detective
stories (Walkowitz 1992: 84). My own reading of Stead found many of the gothic
trimmings that decorate Victorian fiction.62 Stead spent a few weeks investigating
‘undercover’ and introduces his sojourns in a manner reminiscent of Poe’s Fall of the House
of Usher (1839 [1984]):
It seemed a strange, inverted world, that in which I lived those terrible
weeks…For days and nights it is as if I had suffered the penalties inflicted upon
the lost souls in the Moslem hell, for I seemed to have to drink of the purulent
matter that flows from the bodies of the damned (1: 2).
Continuing with the trope of inversion, of things the wrong way round, Stead refers to the
‘underground chambers’ and the ‘dread regions of subterranean vice’, setting the sphere for
the tale of a young girl’s ruin:
From the midwife's the innocent girl was taken to a house of ill fame, No. —, P—
—— street, Regent-street, where, notwithstanding her extreme youth, she was
admitted without question. She was taken up stairs, undressed, and put to bed, the
woman who bought her putting her to sleep. She was rather restless, but under the
influence of chloroform she soon went over. Then the woman withdrew. All was
quiet and still. A few moments later the door opened, and the purchaser entered
the bedroom. He closed and locked the door. There was a brief silence. And then
there rose a wild and piteous cry—not a loud shriek, but a helpless, startled scream
like the bleat of a frightened lamb. And the child's voice was heard crying, in
accents of terror, "There's a man in the room! Take me home; oh, take me home!"
(1: 8).63
61
Walkowitz (1992) notes how the young men in Stead’s retelling of the Greek tell disappeared in his
replacing of the myth to London.
62 Where there are underground chambers in a narrative, sex is never far behind – even if it is never made
explicit. The thrill and horror of Victorian (and contemporary) gothic is at least partially sexual. While I am
inclined against a narrowly psycho-sexual interpretation of the gothic, there is no doubt that lonely castles and
secret chambers have a Freudian resonance.
63 McGrath and Morrow (1991) write that inversion is the ‘basic structural principle’ of the gothic:
Subterranean passages, vaults, dungeons, cellars –these are all staples of the early gothicists. Such
chthonic, claustrophobic spaces they were! Each was a vivid analogue of the tomb, and each
provided a site of inversion, where terror and unreason subverted consensus and rationality, where
passion was transformed into disgust, love turned to hatred and good engendered evil (p. xiii).
Taking into account Bell’s (1994) observation in footnote 50, above, regarding inversion and the image of the
prostitute (destroyer/destroyed), we can see how the gothic narrative worked so well to tell the white slavery
77
Stead’s narratives are produced out of his own experience as an investigative journalist and
include ‘true life stories’ told directly to him, as he claimed, by girls of the street. The
incorporation of these first-person tales gave Stead’s account the ring of truth, a veracity
enhanced by the familiarity of the melodramatic tale (Walkowitz 1992).64 In this, ‘true-life’
accounts share their real-seemingness with the conventions of realistic fiction: ‘Realism is
plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is constructed out of what is
(discursively) familiar’ (Belsey in Doty 2000: 440). Unlike others who have studies Stead’s
work, Walkowitz’s probing of the ‘truth’ of Stead’s account is self-consciously not
concerned with its factual status. Rather, she locates its believability, its ‘true-seemingness’,
in its narrative structure as melodrama. Passive female sexuality, predatory male sexuality,
youth and sexual unknowingness, the venality of poor women, and all the conventions of
melodrama, were ‘discursively familiar’ to Stead’s audience. This familiarity gave the tales
not only their veracity, but also their resonance, their ability to speak to, to be ‘meaningful’
(literally to have meaning) for different constituencies:
Narratives of the ‘real’, such as history and news reporting [and I would add
academic research writings and NGO reports], impose a formal coherence on
events: they ‘narrativize’ data into a coherent ‘well-made’ tale, converting “chaotic
experience into meaningful moral drama” (White in Walkowitz 1992: 83).
Today’s true stories
Narrative – the telling of a tale – thus contributes to its believability. This sheds light on the
staging of contemporary trafficking melodramas in today’s newspapers. To leave Stead in
his ‘Moslem hell’ for the time being, I will move to a contemporary description of an
investigation into the ‘underworld’ that in melodramatic structure shares much with The
Maiden Sacrifice. This account, too, is discursively familiar to its audience, with still-relevant
notions of female passivity and venality coupled with the images of chaos and corruption
in the aftermath of the Balkan wars. Following (unknowingly?) in Stead’s footsteps, the
investigators from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK, undertake an
undercover investigation of trafficking in Romania, posing as customers to try and ‘buy’ a
girl.
myth. Interestingly, the concept of inversion, along with distortion, is an essential element of Marx’s theories
of ideology.
64 The individual case history of the prostitute as the site of authentic truth has itself a long history: Nead
(1988) describes how investigative journalists and religious social workers in the mid 19 th century both used
the technique.
78
Their report begins with a first-person account that with its shameless portrayal of a
terrified innocent could have been written by Stead himself:
“Can I be sure you're not giving me back to them?" Diana whispered from
the backseat of the car. "I'm scared." The trembling figure, huddled in a blanket
against a cold Bucharest night, had only minutes earlier been just one of the legion
of girls for sale in Romania's human-trafficking market. Driven by fear, her words
tumbled out, "They hit me. He stabbed me with a knife. You want to see the
wound? I'm hungry. Do you like me? You want sex with me? Can I have your kids
afterwards? I'll be a good wife. Do you want to marry me? You know, they starved
me. Do you want me to take off my blouse? I need to eat something! Promise I
will never be starved ever again? I want to smoke, too. And don't forget to buy me
chocolate" (Radu 2003).
These ‘wild and piteous cries’ (Stead 1885 1: 1) ‘told in her own words’ enact the coherence
and believability of the account. As in Stead’s tale, the crusading male journalist is also the
hero (Walkowitz 1992). He sets off to buy underage girls – and like Stead, is increasingly
frustrated by his lack of success. At every turn, taxi drivers and doormen are willing to
introduce him to prostitutes, (and as a good journalist he films them all) but all refuse to
bring him (to) children. Stead concurred from his inability to buy children (under 13) – in
what seems a sensible outcome of investigative journalism – that if the investigation failed
to turn up children on the streets, they probably weren’t there. However, our modern-day
hero is undeterred. With the easy shifts in register that is characteristic of trafficking
reports, the narrative moves from children to prostitutes to victims of trafficking without a
hitch.
The prose has a decidedly Victorian flavour (this is common: not only the narrative form
of the myth but certain stylistic flourishes are repeated through the decades, as Irwin (1996)
also remarks). Despite the professed desire to throw light on the trade through showing ‘a
victim’s point of view’, the text is mainly concerned with the journalist’s scary adventures in
Bucharest’s seedy underworld, peopled with such Victorianesque characters as ‘the Dwarf’.
After much effort and reported danger to his own person (and, unlike Stead, with no effort
to record the stories of any of the prostitutes they encounter) the journalist finally succeeds
in ‘buying’ a nineteen year-old ‘mentally retarded’ woman from a man and woman, and as
her saviour, delivers her to an NGO. The description of the NGO is telling: the supposed
‘victims’ saved and taken to the shelter also seem to posses the ability to willingly return to
prostitution. The measure of their consent is the measure of the programme’s success: ‘The
programme has been a success story, as only five girls have since returned to prostitution’
79
(Radu 2003: 5). He follows this with the statement: ‘One is now a psychology student at
university’. The university for today’s ‘white slaves’ fulfils the narrative function of a
marriage in the Victorian melodrama, underscoring the dramatic difference between
hopelessness and hope, saved and fallen.
‘Sacrifices willing and unwilling’
Sold initially for her virginity, Stead’s maidens are unable to escape their inevitable,
mythical, fate:
The maw of the London Minataur is insatiable, and none that go into the secret
recesses of his lair return again. After some years' dolorous wandering in this
palace of despair—for "hope of rest to solace there is none, nor e'en of milder
pang," save the poisonous anodyne of drink—most of those ensnared to-night will
perish, some of them in horrible torture (1: 1).
Stead’s account consists of four parts, in which he records interviews with prostitutes,
police, politicians, and rescue workers. He also recounts his adventures as a would-be
slaver, as he attempts to buy five virgins from a ‘firm of procuresses’.65
Though Stead’s text itself revels as much as supposedly did the ‘silk-hatted, kid-gloved
Minataur’ (Irwin 1996 :2) in the destruction of maidenly innocence, Stead was unable to
completely exorcise the spectre of an active, destructive, female sexuality from his
narrative. Indeed, he actively invokes it when apportioning blame. Stead did not fit all
prostitutes into melodrama’s victim-role – not all were worth saving from the Minataur.
While Butler’s attitude towards streetwalkers who resisted her saving grace was ambiguous
in its mixture of pity and contempt, Stead is completely clear about who deserves to be
saved.
London's lust annually uses up many thousands of women, who are literally killed
and made away with—living sacrifices slain in the service of vice. That may be
inevitable, and with that I have nothing to do. But I do ask that those doomed to the
house of evil fame shall not be trapped into it unwillingly, and that none shall be beguiled
into the chamber of death before they are of an age to read the inscription above
the portal—"All hope abandon ye who enter here”… if we must cast
maidens….nightly into the jaws of vice, let us at least see to it that they assent to their own
immolation, and are not unwilling sacrifices procured by force and fraud (1: 2,
emphasis added).
Female sexuality received its own reward. While ignorant of the mechanics of sex, the girls
he attempts to buy are quite willing to be ‘seduced’ for money, despite Stead’s exhortations
65
The veracity of Stead’s tale has been the subject of speculation; not least because Stead himself was put on
trial for slavery after this account was published. For an account of the trial, see Walkowitz 1992.
80
to upright behaviour. What is most regrettable, to Stead, is the loss of virginity, the ‘most
valuable thing a woman possesses’ (1:2). Far from decrying the commodification of
sexuality (as is today’s feminist argument), Stead quite explicitly uses the language of the
market:
I do not ask for any police interference with the liberty of vice. I ask only for the
repression of crime. Sexual immorality, however evil it may be in itself or in its
consequences, must be dealt with not by the policeman but by the teacher, so long
as the persons contracting are of full age, are perfectly free agents, and in their sin
are guilty of no outrage on public morals. Let us by all means apply the sacred
principles of free trade to trade in vice, and regulate the relations of the sexes by
the higgling of the market and the liberty of private contract (4: 3).
Stead’s ‘maidens’, as Walkowitz notes, ‘speak the undramatic language of sexual barter’ –
even signing contracts agreeing to their seduction for a certain sum. As reproduced by
Stead, one such contract reads:
Agreement. I hereby agree to let you have me for a present of £3 or £4. I will
come to any address if you give me two days' notice. Name —— D ——, aged 16.
Address No. 11, —— Street, H—— (2: 7).
What is noticeably missing from the account is any notion of female sexual desire, and the
presence or lack of it as justification for sex. Throughout Stead’s text, females who consent
lose their most precious procession; and so themselves are lost. The following excerpt,
through which consent runs like a red thread, makes this clear. Stead is talking to a
Scotland yard policeman about his plans to buy a virgin:
"But, I continued, "are these maids willing or unwilling parties to the transaction—
that is, are they really maiden, not merely in being each a virgo intacta in the
physical sense, but as being chaste girls who are not consenting parties to their seduction?”… I
heard some strange tales concerning the precautions taken to render escape
impossible for the girl whose ruin, with or without her consent, has been resolved upon
(1: 3, 7 emphasis added).
Stead’s entire text is structured around the concern with female goodness and virtue and
the lack thereof. Except for Stead himself, men play minor (if crucial) roles in the
melodrama – they are abstract representations of the ruling class and one-dimensional,
pantomime villains. Stead pits female sin against female goodness. The sinners are evil
procuresses and drunken mothers, the sinned against maidens becoming the sinning almost
as soon as they fall, as they lose both their most valuable commodity and their shame
(shyness and shame associated with having a hymen, brazenness with losing it). Yet the text
undermines itself, as both the innocent victims and brazen harlots refuse to stick to their
81
allocated (melodramatic) roles – emerging, despite Stead’s overt framings – as threedimensional figures with complicated relations to, and opinions about, the meaning of
consent and the value of virtue. Side-by-side with lurid accounts of the debauching of
virgins are matter-of-fact stories by prostitutes. Despite Stead’s efforts to write these stories
into his melodrama, their meaning spills over the narrative constraints of his melodrama,
producing an ‘unstable text and a contradictory, obsessive discourse around sexuality’
(Walkowitz 1992: 85).
Stead records his conversion with a fourteen-year old girl who he had arranged to purchase
from the ‘firm’ of ‘Madame X and Z’. The girl had been approached by ‘Madame X’ and
had agreed to meet Stead and allow him to arrange a ‘seduction’ with a ‘gentleman’ for a
certain sum.
But the girl was quite incapable of forming any calculation as to the consequences
of her own action. This will appear from the following conversation. "Now," said
I, "if you are seduced you will get £2 for yourself; but you will lose your
maidenhood; you will do wrong, your character will be gone, and you may have a
baby which it will cost all your wages to keep. Now I will give you £1 if you will
not be seduced; which will you have?" "Please sir," she said, "I will be seduced."
"And face the pain, and the wrong-doing, and the shame, and the possible ruin
and ending your days on the streets, all for the difference of one pound?" "Yes,
sir," and she burst into tears, "we are so poor." Could any proof be more
conclusive as to the absolute inability of this girl of sixteen to form an estimate of
the value of the only commodity with which the law considers her amply able to
deal the day after she is thirteen? (3: 6).
Stead picks out for special vituperation the women who lead girls astray:
There are no subterfuges too cunning or too daring for them to resort to in the
pursuit of their game….Every brothel-keeper worth her salt is a procuress with her
eyes constantly on the look-out for likely girls, and she is quite as busy weaving toils
in which to ensnare fresh women as she is to command fresh customers. When a keeper
has spotted a girl whom, she fancies will be "a good mark" she—for in most cases the
creature is of the feminine gender—sets to work to secure her for her service.’(1: 7,
2: 2 emphasis added).
However, just as in his interviews with prostitutes, his conversations with the ‘evil
procuresses’, Madams X and Z, can also be read differently (and not just because we have
21st century eyes). While their matter-of-fact attitude towards the monetary worth of
virginity and their contempt for ‘silly girls’ who ‘make a fuss’ when it is so much easier to
remain quiet and get the money are not exactly overwhelming in their compassion or
empathy, neither are they the purely evil machinations of the hunters for sacrificial victims.
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Just how were Stead and his public to distinguish between white slaves and venal whores?
One marker of the purity deserving of pity was youth: the younger the victim, the more
likely it would be that she was as yet untainted by venality or by destructive female
sexuality. The victims in Stead’s accounts were all young, often pre-pubescent. As
Walkowitz remarks: ‘Because of their extreme youthfulness and inexperience, Stead's
violated maids lacked the practical resources of Butler's prostitutes; as prepubescent, they
were devoid of the sexual agency that might threaten the ascendancy of male desire' (1992:
84). Yet, the purity of the girl-victim proves as impossible to guard in the narrative itself as
in Stead’s version of the evil city: her status as pure, blameless victim remains ambivalent.66
Contract, consent and class
In keeping with melodramatic convention, the narrative of the Maiden Tribute centres
around the figure of the young, innocent ‘girl of the people’, who is the helpless victim of
the depraved sexual appetites of aristocratic roués. 67 According to Walkowitz, this form
reflected melodrama’s traditional role as an expression of working class desire and
frustration, ‘a form that allowed the weak to speak out and gain agency in their own
defense’ (p. 85). She explains that Stead’s intent with the Pall Mall Gazette, and especially
with The Maiden Tribute was to expand the public sphere of debate to include the working
class. Melodramatic narrative had an essential role to play. Newspapers were already
‘incorporating narrative codes of popular literature, organized around themes of sex and
crime…in the process, these newspapers linked sexual concerns to national and class
concerns’ (Walkowitz 1992: 84).
Stead argues that a girl between the ages of thirteen and sixteen is in danger of losing her
most valuable asset through the inability to be fully appreciative of its value:
The moment a child is thirteen she is a woman in the eye of the law, with absolute
right to dispose of her person to any one who by force or fraud can bully or cajole
her into parting with her virtue. It is the one thing in the whole world which, if
once lost, can never be recovered, it is the most precious thing a woman ever has,
66
Walkowitz’s observation of the legacy of the political effects of Stead’s myth-creation are appropriate to
this study: ‘His narrative was taken up, reworked by different constituencies and social forces. These multiple
transformations gave rise to complex political effects, which were not exhausted in the nineteenth century’
(1992: 85).
67 Irwin (1996) argues that Stead’s narrative was successful in arousing public ire because the victims were
portrayed as daughters of the middle class. She is rather alone in this interpretation: Walkowitz (1992)
extensively documents Stead’s political links to socialism and the working class. My own reading of ‘The
Maiden Tribute’ leads me to agree with Walkowitz’s interpretation. Nead (1988) argues that white slavery
became a popular cause because the plight of the prostitute was transformed into art consumed by the middle
class.
83
but while the law forbids her absolutely to dispose of any other valuables until she
is sixteen, it insists upon investing her with unfettered freedom to sell her person
at thirteen(2: 1).
The ability of a woman to consent to sex is explicitly linked to class relations in his text.
If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to minister to
the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand
the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make…That is surely not too
much to ask from the dissolute rich. Even considerations of self-interest might
lead our rulers to assent to so modest a demand. For the hour of Democracy has
struck, and there is no wrong which a man resents like this. ..But the fathers and
brothers whose daughters and sisters are purchased like slaves, not for labour, but
for lust, are now at last enrolled among the governing classes—a circumstance full
of hope for the nation, but by no means without menace for a class. ..unless the
levying of the maiden-tribute in London is shorn of its worst abuses…resentment,
which might be appeased by reform, may hereafter be the virus of a social
revolution. It is the one explosive which is strong enough to wreck the Throne (1:
2).
Women’s consent becomes the sword of revolution, the rallying cry of republicanism.
Stead’s pleas for ‘consensual’ sexual relations to be left alone by the state also involve a
vision of the state, a democratic state, actually built upon the ire of the working class at the
misappropriation of women’s consent. From free-market bargaining chip, to a republican
threat to the throne, Stead places women’s consent as central to the relationship of the
citizen to the state.
Empire and race in the construction of white slavery
Discourses of white slavery/prostitution mirrored changes in relationships between men
and women and between the classes in Great Britain. The unwilling, innocent victim and
the ‘consensual’ bringer of chaos were not only constructed through presumed essential
differences between men and women’s sexual nature, or through class prejudice. The
narratives of white slavery attempt to mark the purity and innocence of the white slave
through inscribing her with characteristics symbolic of purity. These symbols, which
represented also the meaning of consent, shifted according to the larger discursive context
of which it was a part. This discursive framework took in the relations of race and
colonialism, as well as those of gender and class. The attempts to police purity – to
establish the boundaries of consent – were also attempts to mark and maintain national and
racial boundaries, as these boundaries constantly shifted in the politics of Empire. ‘Real life’
consent may have been fluid and shifting, but the narratives of white slavery attempted to
84
fix and pin down not only gender and class boundaries, but those of nation, colony and
‘race’ as well.
The intertwining of discourses of white slavery with concerns of Empire can be seen in
that part of the campaign against white slavery which focused on the international traffic in
white slaves. In Stead’s narrative, the city was a representational space symbolising the ruin
of innocent girls (and the opportunity for wayward ones!) (Walkowitz 1992). This ‘ruinous
place’ in international traffic was located outside the borders of the nation. Most of Stead’s
account concerns prostitution in London, however, the last article in the series does deal
with ‘the foreign traffic’, described in typically overwrought fashion:
Prostitution in England is Purgatory; under the State regulated system which
prevails abroad it is Hell. The foreign traffic is the indefinite prolongation of the
labyrinth of modern Babylon, with absolute and utter hopelessness of any
redemption. When a girl steps over the fatal brink she is at once regarded as fair
game for the slave trader who collects his human "parcels" in the great central
mart of London for transmission to the uttermost ends of the earth. They move
from stage to stage, from town to town – bought, exchanged, sold – driven on and
ever on like the restless ghosts of the damned, until at last they too sleep "where
the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest" (part 4: 7).
Abolitionists were convinced that the system of regulated brothels in Europe and in Latin
America were at the root of white slavery. The role of melodrama’s villain in this version of
the story was a two-hander: split between Jewish and other ‘foreign’ men as the procurers
and panderers, (with the occasional ‘foreign’ woman playing a supporting role) and wealthy
European aristocrats, ‘Arab sheiks’ (Malvery and Willis 1912) and Jews and Latins in
Buenos Aries (Coote 1910; Bristow 1982; Guy 1991) alternately playing the part of the
client.68 Donna Guy (1991), in a study of anti-white slavery activity concerned with the
‘traffic’ from Britain to Buenos Aires examines how white slavery discourses drew on and
developed ideas that linked female honour to that of the nation:
The central issue that united anti-white slavery campaigns in Europe and Argentina was the
way unacceptable female sexual conduct defined the behaviour of the family, the good
citizen, and ultimately national or religious honor… Rather than reflecting a completely
verifiable reality, white slavery was the construction of a set of discourses about family
reform, the role of women’s work in modernizing societies, and the gendered construction
of politics (1991: 35).
68
According to Bristow, the term white slavery first appeared in 1839, in an anti-Semitic context (1982: 34).
85
The equation of female purity – the ability to withhold consent until marriage – with
national pride was used by feminists in their campaigns for suffrage. Consent in sexual
terms spilled discursively over bodily boundaries into the political arena: women’s lack of
sexual passion translating into a higher morality than that of men, which then became the
basis for women’s participation in Empire. Antoinette Burton has examined, in Burdens of
History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (1994), the manner in
which Victorian feminists utilized the position of the prostitute in Britain and in colonial
India as part of their campaign to prove that English women were fit subjects of political
enfranchisement. This was through their supposed specifically gendered ability, based on
essentialised feminine characteristics, to identify with suffering, and therefore, to represent
the sufferers politically.
Victorian feminists’ arguments around prostitution were grounded in discourses of slavery
(Irwin 1996). According to Burton (1998), the extension of anti-slavery discourses by
Victorian feminists’ beyond their original political context in the early anti-slavery
movement points to the importance of ‘suffering others’ for Victorian feminists in
establishing their claim to be included in the body politic.69 While early campaigns against
prostitution made metaphorical use of the slavery trope, with the advent of the anti-white
slavery campaigns it became a literal description of the condition of prostitution. ‘Slavery’
as used by feminist abolitionists, served to demonstrate the need for feminist intervention:
‘Ideologies of slavery, whether pro-or anti-, were premised on the notion that the slave,
even when capable of resistance, was most often helpless in the face of either natural
incapacity or culturally sanctioned constraint’ (Burton 1998: 341). The use of ‘slavery’ by
feminist and non-feminist campaigners was extremely powerful: as a site of ‘irrefutable
injury’ it served to demonstrate the need for women’s involvement: first in public
philanthropy, and later directly in politics (Burton 1998). The purification of the state, these
feminists argued, could only be achieved through women’s suffrage (Walkowitz 1980).
Narrative, ideology, and political effects
The political campaign against white slavery was an attempt to fix the meaning of white
slavery, to furnish the empty framework of the melodrama with meaning. The key term in
69
The term ‘suffering others’ is from Brown (1995) and is further explored in Chapter Five.
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this fixing of meaning was that of consent. Consent can be seen then, as a ‘floating
signifier’: an empty category whose meaning shifted according to the social demands and
the implied vision of the proper social order that accompanied it. If so, it follows that there
was no single dominant version of the myth of white slavery, but multiple versions
motivated by disparate ideologies.
The image of the prostitute was not fixed by the unwilling white slave – the spectre of
chaos, her inverted double, her consenting evil twin – was lurking behind, (and sometimes
to the fore), leaking in, contaminating her purity, blurring her outlines, confounding all
attempts to fix the meaning of white slavery. Campaigns against white slavery were
constant attempts to pin down and fix her image – an attempt at closure that was always
already thwarted by the image of chaos. Her ghostly presence made it impossible to fix the
boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable female sexuality and to establish a point
of consent beyond the vagaries of interpretation.
We have seen that within the myth of the unwilling slave, produced and suppressed but
never contained by it, was the counter-myth: the woman who consents to sex and thus
brings about her own ruin as well as threatening the social order. It then follows, contrary
to the emphasis in historical approaches such as those of Grittner (1990), Connelly (1980),
and Haag (1999), that it is not in the monomythic image of the prostitute as white
slave/victim that the production and contestation of meanings is to be found. In the
attempts to define white slavery it was not only the white slave who was constructed, but
also the prostitute, the one who consented to her own fall. The presence of the white slave
finds echoes down the centuries in the halls of the UN in Vienna. Chapter Five takes up
the trope of absences/disappearances in Vienna, showing the uncanny mirroring effects of
current trafficking discourses, both in their textual and material forms. Before turning to
the contemporary manifestations of the ghost of the white slave, however, it is necessary to
examine another significant aspect of myth: its function as metaphor. The following
chapter turns to the production of the white slave myth in the United States, exploring the
ways in which white slavery could be seen as a metaphor for social anxieties produced by
changes in American society.
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Chapter Four: Metaphorical innocence: white slavery in America
Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that
pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China
and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices,
established among us by the French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our “levees”
with Polish Jewesses and any others who will make money for them. Shall we defend
our American civilization, or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners –
French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians? We do not speak against them for their
nationality, but for their crimes.’ But this is then refuted by the next bit: ‘On the
Pacific Coast eternal vigilance alone can save us from a flood of Asiaticism, with its
weak woman hood, its regimen of scant chivalry, its polluting vices and its brothel
slavery…On both coasts and throughout all our cities, only an awakening of the
whole Christian conscience and intelligence can save us from the importation of
Parisian and Polish pollution, which is already corrupting the manhood and youth of
every large city in this nation (Bell 1910: 259)
Metaphor and myth
‘Metaphor’ is a term used by a number of white slavery historians to explain the effectiveness
of the myth of white slavery. For example, Grittner (1990) and Irwin (1996) both rely on
Geertz’s notion of metaphor, developed in Ideology as cultural practice. In this highly influential
1969 essay, Geertz champions the application of literary theory to cultural analysis (a defining
feature of structuralism), in particular, the role of metaphor in ideology. Metaphor, argues
Geertz, works in ideology because it makes complicated reality intelligible. Grittner’s
exploration of the metaphorical meanings of white slavery combines this interpretation with
Connelly’s (1980) psycho-social approach. Connelly argues that white-slavery, and the larger
movement to eliminate prostitution of which it was a part, reflected American social angst:
‘The central argument [of his book] is that antiprostitution had at least as much to do with the
anxieties produced by the transformation of American society occurring in the progressive era
as with the actual existence of red-light districts’ (1980: 6).
These approaches are valuable, in that they move our attention from a misguided search for
the ‘facts’ of white slavery, to an exploration of the function of the myth of white slavery in
society. However, there are a number of problems with the ‘myth as metaphor’ approach,
which are not dealt with by white slavery historians in their appropriation of the conceptual
apparatus of myth and metaphor. By pointing out these problems, I do not mean that the
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metaphor approach should be discarded. These analysis point to the need for more careful
attention to the relationship between metaphor and myth, to allow the idea of the white slave
as a symbol and the myth of white slavery as metaphor to retain analytical value; in particular
when applying these to trafficking in women.
First, the correspondence between the metaphor and the social anxiety that is claimed to have
prompted it seems arbitrary.70 Why would concerns about urbanisation, for example, take the
form of a myth about white slavery? Wouldn’t some other myth have done as well? Why that
particular myth, at that particular time? Equally, it is possible to ascribe any number of
plausible metaphorical meanings to the myth of white slavery – so the white slave has been
argued to symbolise everything from fear of women’s sexuality, to the growing
commercialisation of labour.71 Second, as explored in Chapter Two, these approaches remain
rooted in the idea of myth as distortion, of white slavery as mythical because it hid the truth.
Third, as Chapter Three demonstrated, these approaches also fail to account for the instability
of the white slavery myth, for the need for the discursive purity of the white slave to be
preserved through anxious attempts to place her always on the right side of consent. As Stead’s
text so clearly shows, female virtue was ever in danger of transforming into vice. The
demarcation line of consent had to be vigorously policed (literally), were not all women to slip
into the chthonic, chaotic, inverted underworld of prostitution; invoking the terrifying vision
of the community itself inverted, topsy-turvy, the back-to-front morality of carnival come to
stay for good.72
Finally, there is the simplest but perhaps most serious problem: why dress up practical
concerns in symbolic language at all? Why weren’t the concerns – with urbanisation,
70
The concerns about the arbitrariness of the connections between metaphor and reality in accounts of white
slavery were inspired by Henry Tudor’s (1972) observations about the allegorical interpretation of myth. Tudor
argues against a hermeneutical interpretation of myth because a given myth could have a number of possible
allegorical interpretations. According to Tudor, the questions of why messages were encoded in mythical language
at all is not answered by a hermeneutical approach.
71 Hobson (1987) shows a recognition of the problems with the metaphorical approach in her critique of
Connelly (1990), when she takes him to task for an over-reliance on the psycho-social interpretation of
prostitution. She suggests that the concern with prostitution expressed in ‘anti-prostitution’ and white slavery
campaigns actually was a concern with prostitution. She does, however, recognise the ‘symbolic content’ of antiprostitution, in particular the campaign against white slavery.
72 See Bell (1994) for an application of Baktin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ to western prostitution discourse.
89
immigration, etc. – addressed directly? Geertz (1969) and other proponents of the metaphor
approach argue that it is because myth simplifies a complicated reality. But, as Chapter Three
has already shown, the myth of white slavery was anything but simple, with a great number of
possible meanings and interpretations, and used by a great variety of actors in society. Myth is
powerful not because it simplifies reality, but because it carries a vision of how that reality
could be.
This point, as well as a more satisfactory account of the nature of the relationship between
metaphor and myth, is made clear in Laclau’s work on metaphor and ideology, as explored in
Chapter Two. Myth, as set out by Laclau in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990), is
metaphor: the ‘metaphor for an absent fullness’ (Torfing 1999: 115); the fullness of the
community. Applying Laclau’s framework to the notion of metaphor used by Connelly and
Grittner enriches our understanding of the term and provides a clearer link between the
concepts of myth and metaphor. In The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology (1997)
Laclau applies Derrida’s deconstruction to the notion of ‘community’: community is both
impossible and necessary. Impossible, because all of the certainties and fixed characteristics
that make up a ‘community’ can only be understood in relation to a ‘constitutive outside’. For
Laclau, community only exists in relation to what doesn’t belong to it, an idea made familiar by
Said’s (Said 1976) concept of ‘the Other’. The ‘impossibility’ of community comes about as the
community strives for completeness, for closure, for ‘fullness’ in Laclau’s terminology.
However, this ‘fullness’ can never be achieved because community only exists through defining
itself against something else. The essence of community is its incompleteness, hence, the
‘complete community’ is what Laclau calls ‘the necessary but impossible object’ (1997: 298).
The impossible community is a political struggle for hegemony: a conflict between a
discursively constructed ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, community is necessary, because
humans create and maintain identities through this impossible object. From this paradoxically
impossible and necessary space arises myth.
Myth serves a function in the political struggles which define communities: it provides a
‘surface of inscription’ on which ‘dislocations and social demands’ can be written (Laclau 1990:
65, 68). At the same time, myth is used by groups in the social struggle to provide a vision of
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their version of the ideal society, a society in which their ‘community’ is complete and the
threatening ‘Other’ no longer exists. Myth serves to ‘suture’ social dislocations through a
representation of how society could be (Laclau 1990: 62). So we can see that for Laclau, myth
operates in two manners; it is both the surface on which social demands are inscribed and at
the same time a model of how society should be. This representation of society – the model of
the ideal society – is what Laclau terms ‘metaphor’. And, like the ‘impossible communities’
they represent, myth is incomplete: ‘social myths are essentially incomplete: their content is
constantly reconstituted and displaced’ (Laclau 1990: 63). So Laclau helps us look for meaning
in the very contradictions and variations within the myth of white slavery.
This is significant for looking at the myth of trafficking. Following the method introduced in
Chapter Three, this chapter traces the genealogy of the trafficking myth through examining
discourses of white slavery. I concentrate on the metaphor of white slavery as it functioned in
the United States. Though the focus is historical, the genealogical link to contemporary debates
on trafficking will be signposted. In particular, this chapter serves to historically locate the
threat to the community which was inscribed on and in the myth of white slavery. As a
preliminary formulation, I will suggest that in Progressive era America, the myth of white
slavery was a metaphor in which American society struggled to realise itself through discursive
constructions of race and gender. The implications for a study of contemporary myths of
trafficking are indicated throughout the chapter, and explored in detail in Chapters Five and
Six.
The American anti-white slavery campaign
According to one estimate, over one billion pages on the subject of prostitution were written
in America between 1900 and 1920 (Haag 1999). Forty cities formed so-called ‘vice
commissions’ to investigate the extent of prostitution in their municipalities. White slavery
laws were adopted to halt the feared national and international trade in women. The white
slave herself became the subject of a huge number of books, articles, plays, and sculptures.
Across America, groups were set up to abolish ‘the social evil’: prostitution. The groups
involved in fighting prostitution were varied, and included women’s groups, temperance
organisations, religious groups, and medical associations. These organisations often differed in
their ideologies and goals, but were able to unite around one issue: the elimination of
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prostitution. In their efforts to root out ‘the social evil’, they were greatly influenced by the
British campaign against white-slavery. However, while the English experience may have
provided a template for activism, there was a also a home-grown tradition of purity reform for
American campaigners to draw on.
Early purity
While campaigns against prostitution in America have a long history, in the early 19th century, a
new approach to prostitution emerged. This approach, according to Connelly, was a result of
urbanisation, which made prostitution more visible, and was ‘influenced… by evangelical and
perfectionist notions of social reform’ (Connelly 1980). Groups such as the Women’s New
York Female Reform Society, founded in 1834, combined evangelical zeal with crusading
efforts at social reform, in their attempts to convert prostitutes and close New York City’s
brothels (Smith-Rosenberg 1985). However, before the civil war, prostitution as an issue for
social reform was less important than slavery and temperance. In the 1860s and 70s, concern
around prostitution led to a “purity crusade”. Groups of women, anti-slavery campaigners,
religious groups and temperance organisations joined in a fight dedicated to ‘the regeneration
of American sexual morality’ (Connelly 1980: 5). Their main efforts were directed against
‘regulationists’. Led mainly by doctors concerned with venereal disease, inspired by European
experiences, they attempted to establish regulation of prostitution in Chicago, St. Louis and
New York.
By the mid-1880s, the purity agenda had grown to include child rearing, moral education,
social hygiene, and prohibition. Prostitution was still important, but it remained mainly a local
issue: ‘The suppression of prostitution was one plank in a broad platform of social purity: child
rearing, sex and moral education, social hygiene, and temperance were elements of a moral
vision that emphasized self-control and moderation’ (Grittner 1990: 43). It wasn’t until the first
decade of the 19th century that prostitution was to become a national issue.
Modernisation
Between 1890 and the beginning of WW1, American society underwent a great transformation,
from ‘a predominantly rural-minded, decentralised, principally Anglo-Saxon, productionoriented and morally absolutist society to a predominantly urban, centralised, multi-ethnic,
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consumption oriented, secular and relativist society’ (Connelly 1980: 7). In the 1870s, America
both saw itself as, and actually was, still a nation of farms and small towns. The dominance of
agriculture in the economy was challenged by the industrial revolution. ‘By the 1880s and
1890s, the structure of American industry had changed dramatically. Centralized, large-scale
manufacturing, national markets, giant corporations, finance capitalism, had concentrated
economic power in a few cities’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1985: 170).
The nature of immigration to America also changed dramatically between 1890 and the
beginning of WW1. Whereas 19th century immigration was mostly from Northern Europe and
Scandinavia, the new century saw the arrival of increasing numbers from Southern Europe,
Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Connelly (1980) calls the arrival of ‘over thirteen
million immigrants’ between 1900 and 1914: ‘one of the most profound social and
demographic transformations in American history’ (p. 48). These changes inspired a range of
reactions across the spectrum of American politics. Haag (1999) divides these reactions into
two principle camps: ‘one that espoused a romantic-racial “uplift” of the immigrant to
citizenship and another that endorsed the exclusion of “savage” races’ (p. 95). She calls these
an ‘assimilationist’ and a ‘eugenicist’ tendency. The official creation and public reaction to
white slavery took shape in conversation with both of these tendencies.
These massive changes, though in one sense the pride of an America which viewed itself as the
most modern of societies, were also in tension with a society that prided itself on its traditional
values. As Smith-Rosenberg (1985) colourfully describes it: ‘Small-town Americans had
become flotsam and jetsam in the ongoing maturation of American capitalism’ who viewed the
cities as ‘Sodoms and Gomorrahs of sexual excess and sybaritic indulgence, Babels of
conflicting languages, religions and customs, chaotic, ungovernable, the great cities epitomized
the foreign, the unknown, and the dangerous’(p. 171-2). But it was not only small towners
who experienced a heady mixture of anxiety and the sense of new possibilities afforded by
America’s modernisation. In the cities and suburbs, new political actors emerged whose
ideologies combined bold hopes for remedying societal ills with traditional prejudices. Their
reforming zeal characterised the first decades of the twentieth century in America, which is
known as the Progressive Era.
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Progressivism and prostitution
The reforming impulse of the Progressive era captured the ambiguities between tradition and
progress, fear and fascination; resulting from the rapid social changes in the decades around
the turn of the century. Middle-class, educated men and women turned their attention to the
plight of the city’s working classes and immigrants, tackling a range of issues including
housing, delinquency, child labour, and women’s wages. While the range of organisations and
individuals had differing, and even conflicting, ideas about why, how, and which situations
needed reforming, they had a number of things in common. These included a belief in ‘expert’
knowledge, the power of statistics, and new notion of the relationship between the state and
the citizen. According to Hobson (1987), this had two key elements: firstly, ‘the state had to
take a more active role in regulating the social welfare of its citizens’, and secondly, ‘that the
private and public spheres of activity could not be disentangled’ (p. 140).
It was in the context of great social upheaval and the anxiety and hope that these changes
brought that prostitution became a nation-wide issue of concern. According to Connelly
(1990): ‘What produced the full-throated alarm of the progressive years was a new evaluation
of prostitution’s significance…during the progressive years...[prostitution’s] inherent capacity
to provoke fear and alarm was greatly expanded’ (p. 6). It was not all fear and alarm, however:
the Progressive rejection of regulation, of the idea of prostitution as ‘a necessary evil’,
embodied a great, hopeful optimism about the possibilities of radical social change. As
Hobson (1987) describes it, Progressive views of prostitution involved ‘a belief that the state
should create a net to catch those fallen outside its protection and should suppress rather than
manage the business of prostitution' (p. 140).73 Prostitution reformers combined Progressive
ideals such as improved health and better working and living conditions for the working class
with social purity ideals of sexual continence. This led, according to Nicky Roberts, to an
equation between poor working/living conditions and immorality (Roberts 1992). Individual
prostitutes were also ideal candidates for reformers of all ilks, from conservative religious to
feminist. Well-meaning, but intrusive and restraining on the lives of prostitutes, these
73
Haag (1999) makes the most radical claims about the effect of the white slavery campaigns on changing liberal
ideologies, arguing that the Progressive responses to prostitution helped shape the modern notion of personal
freedom which encompasses, for example, sexual and reproductive freedoms.
94
reforming activities embodied another formative tension within the Progressive spirit: that
between social justice and social control (Hobson 1987).
Here we can plant the first genealogical signpost. The societal changes occurring during the
Progressive years in America were not happening in isolation. While hardly today’s so-called
‘global village’, the world in this period was undergoing a number of disruptions which parallel
those of today. These included mass migration, industrialisation, and the most significant, the
seeds of the disintegration of the old global order of British-dominated colonialism. Today, the
concern with trafficking is most clearly linked with the huge global movements of people.
These migrations are indicators and results of varied global changes, brought together under
the name ‘globalisation’. Historians using the metaphorical approach to white slavery have
argued that it was precisely the anxiety produced by these changes that gave the myth its
potency and power. Though one must be careful not to place too much weight on the broad
similarities between the global social/political/economic situation of the pre-WWI one
decades and those of today, it may be that the similarities in the stories of white slavery and
those of trafficking reflect also the similarities in the broad social contexts in which they
occurred.
The white slave as symbol
The actions led by local purity groups against regulation in cities such as San Francisco, New
York, and Chicago, were largely successful. However, dedicated as purity campaigners were to
abolishing prostitution entirely, the fight against regulation never became a national issue,
simply because regulation itself never became a national issue (Hobson 1987). This was largely
down to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of doctors. American medical opinion, after some
support for regulation, moved towards favouring the suppression of prostitution as the best
route to stopping the spread of venereal disease. The issue that sparked national concern was
white slavery. However, it is a mistake to see ‘white slavery’ as a distinct, bounded area within
the larger area of concern with prostitution.74 For campaigners, policy makers and the public,
the distinctions between prostitution and white slavery were blurred or non-existent: for many,
white slavery was synonymous with prostitution. (This will be explored further below).
74
Most historians do take this approach, Haag (1999) being a notable exception.
95
Nonetheless, it was when prostitution was grasped through the myth of white slavery that it
began to resonate with the national conscience. British campaigners’ success in whipping up
public support for the cause of eliminating prostitution through horrific tales of white slavery
inspired American reformers. According to Grittner (1990), ‘American efforts to abolish
prostitution foundered, but the efforts of British purity leaders to outlaw the practice they
defined as “white slavery” soon gave American reformers hope’ (p. 43). It was however, the
more sensationalist and repressive elements of the British campaign against white slavery that
were to prove more influential in the United States. William Stead’s The Maiden Tribute (1885)
was published in America and was widely read and commented on; Stead himself visited
Chicago to meet with anti-prostitution campaigners. America’s ‘home grown’ campaign for
moral reform, of which the elimination of ‘vice’ was a chief element, was helped along by
British ‘social purity’ campaigners, such as William Coote. Coote set up the National Vigilance
Association (NVA) in 1911, with a repressive moral agenda that focused on the sexual
behaviour of young people. The NVA was very active in the British campaign against white
slavery and, according to Walkowitz (1980) was responsible for the increasingly repressive turn
that the movement took. Josephine Butler resigned her membership in the NVA in protest.
Coote was instrumental in turning American purity’s attention to ‘the white slave trade’. On a
visit to America in 1906, he lead a ‘successful campaign’ to establish an American version of
the NVA (Grittner 1990).
All this activity around white slavery led to a huge outpouring of narrative material. As in
Britain, the white slavery narratives in the United States took various forms, from books,
newspaper articles, and reports to films, paintings and sculptures. As in Britain, these
representations displayed a variety of narrative conventions such as crime drama and gothic
fiction. Throughout these ran melodrama, in which virtue was pitted against vice in an
uncomplicated moral tale (Grittner 1990). As in the contemporary accounts of trafficking in
Chapter One, the victim’s virtue was rhetorically achieved through a number of devices: by
stressing the youth of the victim, her whiteness, and her unwillingness to be a prostitute. In
line with melodramatic convention, virtue had her counterpart, the evil white slave trader. Like
the British version of the white slave myth, the innocent victim was constructed through the
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ghostly presence of her opposite: the prostitute as symbol of social disorder. However,
melodrama’s cardboard cast of characters were filled out with particularly American concerns.
If we apply Laclau’s (1990) formulation of myth to this particular historical juncture, we can
postulate that the social disorder that the myth attempted to suture was due to the ‘dislocation’
of American society as a result of changing patterns of work, living, and gender, race, and class
relations. The white slave, in the American symbolic incarnation, stood for more than the loss
of sexual innocence. She stood for loss of an entire, disappearing, and imagined ‘American way
of life’: imagined because the notions of gender, race, class, and geography on which this way
of life depended were never stable, were never just ‘the way things were’. The myth of white
slavery was an attempt to re-assert the ‘fullness of the community’ to shore up faltering
certainties, through renaturalisation of their ideological suppositions. This will be
demonstrated by an examination of some of the key documents and political events that
shaped the white slavery debates in America. Throughout, it must be kept in mind that the
purpose behind the investigation of history is in order to ferret out clues to explain the
contemporary reappearance of the white slave myth.
How white was white slavery?
In America, as in Britain, the campaign against white slavery derived much of its rhetorical
strength by presenting its fight as one against slavery: borrowing both the language and the
sense of moral outrage generated by anti-slavery activism (Irwin 1996, Burton 1994). Jane
Addams begins her 1912 polemic against white slavery, A New Conscious and an Ancient Evil ,
with a chapter entitled ‘An Analogy’. The analogy she makes is between ‘the social evil’ of
prostitution and black slavery, and between the work of anti-prostitution groups to those of
the American anti-slavery abolitionists:75
Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in regard to this
twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself and even more persistent, find a
possible analogy between certain civic, philanthropic and educational efforts directed
against the very existence of this social evil and similar organized efforts which
preceded the overthrow of slavery in America (p. 4).
75
The term ‘abolitionist’ is confusing, as Josephine Butler adopted the term to refer to her work against the
Contagious Diseases Acts. Because the term ‘abolitionist’ is still used in current debates around prostitution to
indicate a certain political position (see Chapter One), I will use the tautological phrase ‘anti-slavery abolitionists’
when referring to campaigns against black slavery.
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But reflected through the mirror of the myth of white slavery, anti-slavery abolitionism came
to be inverted, twisted, and distorted, as white women perversely came to occupy the
victimised narrative space formerly occupied by the black slave. Here we can posit a second
signpost: contemporary anti-trafficking efforts also use the language of slavery, lending
urgency and historical significance to their campaigns. And, like the twisted history of the
appropriation of black slavery in white slavery narratives, the contemporary twinning of the
two has dubious results, explored in Chapter Five.
The white slave in American narratives was both literally and metaphorically white. That is, the
young, innocent, virgin in the white slavery narratives was most often presented as having
white skin (literal meaning). At the same time, her whiteness symbolised her state of unsullied
virtue (metaphoric meaning). The symbolic power of whiteness for Americans provided a
reading principle (in Laclau’s (1997) sense, a recognition that interpellates identity) which was
especially potent for white Americans after the dislocations of the civil war: ‘The traditional
Western connotation that whiteness equals purity and blackness equals depravity flourished in
a myth that appealed to the moral and prurient natures of its audience’ (Grittner 1990: 131). In
American white slavery narratives, the role of virtue’s downfall was very often played by
immigrant men and freed male slaves. As ‘white slavers’, pimps, and clients, ‘racially other’
men were charged with perpetrating a vast immoral network which threatened not only
innocent American girlhood, but the very moral fibre of the nation. This was a perverse
inversion of the historical reality of black slavery in America, an attempt to reconfigure its
horrifying meaning by recasting the sexual violation of white women at the hands of dark men
as ‘more terrible than any black slavery that ever existed in this or any other country’ (Grittner
1990: 74).76
Most historians consider the phrase white slavery to be of little significance in racial terms.
Hobson (1987), for example, calls white slavery a ‘misrepresentation’, as the ‘real’ traffic also
involved Asian and African women, or as she calls it, ‘non-white slavery’. This phrase, which
76
This phrase comes from The Social Evil in Chicago, the report of the Chicago Vice Commission of 1911,
considered by historians to be one of the most influential anti-white slavery documents.
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has no sort of sexual connotation, or any actual meaning at all, exposes the non-arbitrary
nature of the term white slavery. In other example, Haag (1999) maintains that white slavery
was a ‘misnomer’ because ‘white slavery was not an idea focused principally on the
enslavement of white girls’ (p. 69, emphasis added).77 She argues that a number of anti-white
slavery reformers were also concerned with the traffic in immigrant women. However, the
concern with immigrant women did not negate the racial implications of white slavery. As
explored below, immigrant women entered the debate on terms which both contested and reiterated racial prejudices. It remains the case that white slavery in America could only, and did
only, take shape through discursive opposition to black slavery. White slavery was an
inherently racist discourse.
Prominent anti-white slavery reformers, such as Roe and Turner, expressly configured their
arguments in racial terms.78 For example, US District Attorney Edwin W. Sims described the
crime as follows: ‘The white slave trade may be said to be the business of securing white
women and of selling them or exploiting them for immoral purposes’ (1910: 14). Sims was
highly influential in shaping the public debate on white slavery. The frontispiece of Illinois
Vigilance Association Secretary Ernest A. Bell’s edited compendium on white slavery Fighting
the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on The White Slave Trade (origin of the above quote), has a
picture of Sims captioned ‘Hon. Edwin W. Sims: The man most feared by all white slave
traders’. Along with other Chicago-based activists such as Clifford Roe and Earnest Bell he led
sustained campaigns against ‘vice chiefs’ (Grittner 1990), and helped draft the 1910 Mann
(White Slave Trade) Act (Grittner 1990: 87). He was much admired by prominent women’s
rights activists such as Jane Addams (Addams 1911). As Chicago’s District Attorney, he
prosecuted the majority of the white slavery cases in Chicago. It could thus not be said that his
views were inconsequential.
The cause of historians’ failure to appreciate the racial significance of ‘white’ in white slavery is,
I believe, a result of a confusion between the literal and the symbolic meaning of white
77
Though when Haag (1999) deals with other ‘tropes of sexual consent and violence’, such as interracial marriage
and interracial rape, the symbolic power of ‘whiteness’ in a sexual context is well-recognised and provocatively
explored.
78 see Grittner (1990).
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slavery.79 The correct approach to assessing the significance of ‘white’ is not to ascertain, like
Hobson (1987), whether this misrepresented reality, or, like Haag (1999), the extent of
reformers’ concern about immigrant women, but to investigate the symbolic power carried by
‘white’ when linked to ‘slavery’ in a sexualised context. Whatever the historical circumstances
in which the term white slavery came into being, by the time is was picked up by American
purity reformers, ‘white’ was indelibly attached to ‘slavery’. 80 It gave the concept its meaning; it
was not simply an anachronistic hanger-on. It is clear from reading the most influential white
slavery narratives, such as those of the Chicago reformers, that ‘whiteness’ was most often
explicitly employed to emphasise the horror of the white slave’s fate.
Fear of erosion of racial boundaries
The myth of white slavery embodied the fear of the erosion of racial boundaries, the
contamination and eventual disintegration of the illusionary ‘wholeness’ of the community of
white America: whether by freed black slaves or ‘dark’ foreigners. The fear of the freed slaves
and desire to preserve racial boundaries between American whites and blacks was highly
evident in the writings of prominent anti-white slave campaigners, such as Samuel Painter
Wilson. Wilson’s writings, according to Grittner (1990), reached the high point of lurid
rhetorical flourish of the group of moral reformers who emerged in Chicago in the first decade
of the 19th century. Wilson, in his 1910 narrative of white slavery in Chicago, Chicago and its
Cess-Pools of Infamy, wrote that compared to white slavers, ‘the Congo slave traders of the old
days appear like Good Samaritans’ (quoted in Grittner 1990: 70) and goes on to describe his
experience in Chicago: ‘I have heard shrieks and hear cries and groans of agony that have
never been surpassed at any public slave auction America has ever witnessed’ (in Grittner
1990: 70).
79 Disturbingly, while decrying the racist elements in white slavery narratives, historians like Hobson (1986),
Grittner (1990) and Connelly (1980) themselves all to easily slip into stereotypical thinking where ‘non-white
slavery’ is concerned. While white slavery in its literal meaning is seen as an exaggeration of reality; a distortion of
truth; with historical and modern sources interrogated heavily; accounts of the traffic in non-white women, and
the involvement of non-white men in this trade, are taken for literal truth. While it is beyond the scope of my
research to investigate the ‘facts’ as presented by Bristow (1977), the uncritical acceptance of the evidence for this
trade is distressing.
80 Haag (1999) bolsters her argument for the relative irrelevance of ‘white’ in white slavery by tracing its first
appearance in radical post-bellum thought in the US. Bristow (1997), however, traces the first use of the term to a
letter from Victor Hugo in which he used the term to referred to prostitution in an anti-Semitic fashion.
100
Wilson’s narrative presents blacks and foreigners as inter-related threats to American white
womanhood. The two played complementary roles:
Wilson’s description of the problem made non-WASPs the source of the greatest
sexual danger. If the “brutal Russian Jewish whoremonger” was a villain, so were the
blacks and Chinese who joined white men in the brothels. The image of “young white
girls, huddled in with the worst mob of negroes” gave Wilson his proof that Chicago
was fouled by cesspools of immorality (Grittner 1990: 69).
Myth of the black man
The white slave myth also worked through that of another, extremely potent American myth:
the black man as brutal and sexually rapacious, as raper of white women (Grittner 1990). The
‘social dislocations’ of the civil war and the end of slavery were inscribed in mythical tales of
black men lying in wait to rape white women. The real effect of these beliefs was a dramatic
rise in the lynching of black men in the American South in the 1890s. According to Martha
Hodes (1997), while beliefs in black men’s super-potent sexuality and sub-human nature were
prevalent (indeed a cornerstone of) slavery, it was not until the end of slavery threatened the
stability of the dividing lines between white and black, that the myth of the black rapist became
so prevalent, with such horrific consequences. The black man’s sexual danger was linked to his
political threat to the white community, which as Hodes records, was recognised by antilynching campaigners Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells: Douglass wrote ‘It is only since the
Negro has become a citizen and a voter…that this charge [of raping white women] has been
made’ (quoted in Hodes 1997: 6).
As the demise of slavery shook the foundations of white supremacy, ‘interracial’ sex between
black men and white women became the paradigmatic expression of sexual violation. As in
Victorian Great Britain, acceptable sexual behaviour was expressed in terms of consent. Sex
between a black man and a white woman became that which per definition could not be
consented to (Hodes 1997). Sociologist Lester Ward in 1911 stated in his ‘four laws of consent’
that, ‘The women of any race will vehemently reject the men of a race which they regard as
lower than their own’ (in Haag 1999: 143). Somewhat strangely, the interworking of racialised
discourses of citizenship and sexual consent do not figure in Haag’s analysis of white slavery,
which is limited to shifting notions of the role of the state in labour contracts. However, it is
possible to see from the work of other historians the ways in which the victim, who (crucially)
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played no part in her own downfall, was inscribed with whiteness. By writing her ‘slaver’ as
black/ ‘dark', any suggestion of complicity in her own fall was removed.
White slavery’s racialised nexus of sexual innocence and sexual violation was constructed not
only through narrative contrast with black men, but also through unwritten opposition to black
women – a point barely touched on by historians of white slavery. The white slave’s
metaphorical shadow was ‘coloured’. In discourses of slavery, black women were differently
positioned than white women in relation to a notion of consent. While Christian morality
frowned on white male sexual license, ‘rape’ as the possible description of a sexual encounter
between a white man and a black woman could not be conceptualised. Not only was she
barred from considerations of consent because of her non-human, ‘property’ status, but black
women’s sexual nature was considered voracious, indiscriminate and animalistic. Ward’s
consent laws had their corollary for a sexual relationship between a black woman and a white
man: ‘The women of any race will freely accept the men of a race which they regard as higher’
(in Haag 1999: 143). For many white Americans, including anti-white slavery campaigners, it
was unthinkable that a black woman would not consent to sex with a white man: how could a
black woman become a ‘white slave?’. The absence of mention of American black women in
anti-prostitution campaigns or consideration of this gap in historians’ account of this time is
notable.81 Where champions of reform twisted and turned over what constituted genuine white
slavery as opposed to ‘willing prostitution’, American black women fell outside this
consideration altogether. As Gail Pheterson has examined in The Whore Stigma (1986), ‘whore’,
81
An exception to this general tendency is Jane Addams (1912), who devotes a few pages to investigating the
cause of the high number of ‘colored’ women involved in ‘the social evil’. Her work shows that mixture of social
progressiveness and conservative morality that characterises her work. On the one hand, including a
consideration of black women’s work in prostitution in a book on white slavery is highly remarkable. This
progressive tendency is also reflected in her targeting of social and economic conditions – slavery and its
aftermath – rather than innate tendencies as the cause of black involvement in prostitution. However, while she
argues that slavery is to blame for black people’s lack of moral restraint, the impression is still one of a group in
society whose moral evolution has not reached that of white society:
The community forces the very people who have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into a
dangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results, as might easily be predicted, in a very
large number of colored girls entering a disreputable life…it seems all the more unjustifiable that the
nation which is responsible for the broken foundations of this family life should carelessly permit the
negroes, making their first struggle towards a higher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most
flagrant temptations which our civilization tolerates (Addams 1912: 119).
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carries specific racial connotation (as does ‘pimp’). By virtue of her literal blackness, in the eyes
of much of white America, the black woman had no claim to virtue.
White slavery ‘worked’ as a metaphor because of the connotations of ‘whiteness’ – purity,
innocence and virtue – were juxtaposed in a melodramatic framework with its opposite,
‘blackness’ – impurity, guilt, and vice (Geertz 1969, Grittner 1990). This opposite was both
visible and invisible, present and absent: the melodramatic presence of the black villain/‘dark’
man, whose darkness was also both literal and symbolic; and the supplementary absence of the
‘dark’ woman, whose ‘shadiness’ was sexually and racially constructed. Thus the white slave
was able to mythically exist precisely because she was not a ‘black slave’.
Bad girls and ‘Bad Niggers’: Jack Johnson and the Mann Act
The story of the prosecution of Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight world champion, under the
US 1910 White Slave Act (Mann Act), is an example of the narrativisation of ‘race’/sex, in
which the shape of the ‘innocent white slave’ is thrown into relief against the blackness of the
boxer. Randy Roberts’ Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (1983) documents the
trial of Johnson under the Act. Roberts’ main argument is that Johnson symbolised the threat
of disorder whites feared from the de-stabilising of racial boundaries. During his trial, the
melodrama of white slavery was actually performed, as Jack Johnson became the living
embodiment of the ‘white slaver’, whose congress with white women had to be punished.
Jack Johnson was a heavyweight boxer from Galveston, Texas, born in 1878. When Johnson
began his career in the 1890s, whites and blacks did not fight against each other in heavyweight
matches (though black-white fights in the lower-profile lightweight divisions did occur). Why
was this the case? To answer that, we have to look at the racial significance that boxing carried
at that time in the United States. White Americans saw the dominance of white Americans in
the boxing ring as evidence of American superiority: it proved that ‘in the social Darwinist
sense, Americans were the most fit people in the world’ (Roberts 1983: 17). America’s boxing
chauvinism reveals how nation and race were linked for many white Americans: the American
community was white, thus American superiority meant white superiority. Johnson the black
fighter possessed American citizenship in name, but he was excluded from the ‘real’ America,
the nation, the community that was white. ‘Whites also feared racial unrest in the “unlikely
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event” that a black fighter should win a fight against a white man’ (Roberts 1983).82 It was not
only a win that was feared: even the sight of a black man and a white one on equal footing in a
boxing ring were seen as enough to bring down the walls of racial separation (Roberts 1983).
Until 1908, Johnson fought only other black heavyweights or low-profile white heavyweights;
‘white fighters so unimportant that they had no reputations to lose to black boxers’ (Roberts
1983: 19). It is today, when heavyweight boxing is so dominated by black men, quite surprising
to find out just how threatening Johnson’s ring prowess was to white America. When he won
the world championship from white Britain Tommy Burns in 1908, white commentators spoke
in apocalyptic tones about the end of Caucasian race dominance. Blacks regarded the victory as
a portent of their advance, as the black newspaper the Richmond Planet wrote, ‘no event in forty
years has given more genuine satisfaction to the coloured people of this country than has the
signal victory of Jack Johnson’ (Roberts 1983: 55). For whites and blacks, Johnson was more
than a boxer, and boxing was more than a sport: the boxing ring became the place where the
‘race war’ was fought.
The sense of white doom at the Burns fight was nothing compared to the devastation caused
by Johnson’s defeat of the ‘Great White Hope’: former American heavyweight champion of
the world John Jeffries. The fight, in Reno on July 4, 1910, generated intense interest
nationwide: Roberts records that 100,000 words per day were sent from Reno in the pre-fight
weeks. ‘From the very first, it was advertised as a match of civilization and virtue against
savagery and baseness’ (p. 85). The belief among many whites was that 'race relations remained
most stable when blacks remained in their clearly defined, circumscribed place and when there
was no nonsense about equality’ (p. 110). For whites, a black world champion 'challenged the
old notion of the blacks as an inferior race and raised once more the spectre of black
rebellion…Johnson was transformed into a racial symbol that threatened America's social
order’ (p. 110-111).
82
White opinion, backed by ‘evolutionary’ science, was that black fighters, as members of an ‘insipient race’ were
physically and psychologically inferior to whites. While black fighters were widely believed to have harder heads
than whites, this was seen as the result of their smaller brain capacity. Blacks were seen as passive, lacking the will
to win, shifty, and lazy. This was used to explain white dominance of the sport: when Johnson began to beat
white heavyweights, these same inferior characteristics were now used as an explanation of his victories (R.
Roberts 1983).
104
Not only did Johnson threaten white American manhood in the ring, he compounded the
threat by ‘poaching on’ white American women. Johnson had relationships with a number of
white women, all prostitutes, one of whom, Lucy, he married in 1910. He was the black man
who beat white men in that most masculine of pursuits – heavyweight boxing – and then ‘takes
his women’. Johnson menaced not only his white opponents in the ring, but white American
manhood and the white American nation. Roberts suggests (following Wiggins 1971) that
Johnson was an example of what was then called ‘the Bad Nigger’: ‘a black man who chose a
different attitude and station from the ones prescribed by white society’ (p. 118). The Bad
Nigger was celebrated in African-American folklore, but to white society, he represented the
subversion of racial order.
Johnson’s threat to the moral and social order was not taken lightly by the government. His
deliberate flouting of racial boundaries through his open marriage to a white woman was too
provocative to let pass. After one failed attempt to bring Johnson to trial for abducting his wife
Lucy (who was incarcerated ‘for her own protection’ for a number of months), Johnson was
brought before a grand jury on white slavery charges regarding a former girlfriend, a white
prostitute named Belle, in 1912. The 1911 Mann Act was designed to act primarily against
domestic white slavery, and forbids the transport of any woman or girl across state lines for
‘prostitution, debauchery or any other immoral purpose’ (Grittner 1990: 87). Belle, Johnson
and a few other prostitutes had traveled together to and from Johnson’s fights, living it up it
cities like Chicago, New York and Minneapolis. During the trial, the state was unable to prove
that Johnson had in any way profited from Belle’s prostitution, or that he had ‘induced’ her to
cross state lines. Nonetheless, Johnson was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
Roberts argues cogently that the trial was about more than just Johnson’s guilt or innocence.
Assistant District Attorney Parkin, prosecuting, made this clear in his comments after the
verdict was passed:
This verdict…will go around the world. It is the forerunner of laws to be passed in
these United States we may live to see-laws forbidding miscegenation. This negro, in
the eyes of many, has been persecuted. Perhaps as an individual he was. But is was his
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misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil permitting the intermarriage of
whites and blacks (quoted in Roberts 1983: 177, ellipses in Roberts).83
Roberts concludes: ‘Johnson the symbol had to be punished, even if Johnson the man was
technically innocent of violating the Mann Act’ (p. 178). In the words of a journalist of the
time, Johnson was being ‘meted out a terrible punishment for daring to exceed what is
considered a Negro’s circle of activities’ (quoted in Roberts 1983: 178). The KKK capitalised
on the result of the trial, attempting to stop Jackson from taking part in a boxing match in
Indiana because he was a ‘white slaver’. They also used fears of ‘white slavery’ in their
recruitment pamphlets (Blee 1992).
If Johnson was the symbol of transgressive black manhood, what did his counterpart in the
actually performed melodrama symbolise? This is a question that Roberts does not explore.
Both Lucy, Johnson’s wife, and Belle, his girlfriend, were prostitutes who had already worked
for a number of years before he met them. It was impossible to portray them as betrayed
innocents in the court proceedings. However, this did not matter to the outcome of the trial:
Judge Carpenter, in his instructions to the jury, stated: ‘The law does not apply solely to
innocent girls. It is quite as much an offence against the Mann Act to transport a hardened,
lost prostitute as it would be to transport a young girl, a virgin’ (quoted in Roberts 1983: 177).
While this is technically true, it is a curious statement for the time, highly out of keeping with
the tone of the most strident advocates of the White Slavery Act, who made much of the
innocence of the girls, and the deception and violence needed to accomplish their ruin (see
Connelly 1980: 128).84 In most cases, an ‘immoral’ woman did not have the sympathy of the
public, and was not likely to be believed in court. White slavery reformer Charles Nelson
83
Parkins was a prominent anti-white slavery campaigner, who contributed several chapters to Bell’s The War on
White Slavery (1910). These chapters, however, give little indication of his virulent racism.
84 Grittner (1990) includes a quote to the US legislature from Representative Gordon Russel of Texas, a fervent
advocate of the Mann Act: ‘Let me tell you gentlemen, no nation can rise higher than the estimate which it places
upon the virtue and purity its womanhood’. After struggling to end the slavery of “the black man” could
Congress do no less than help ‘abolish the slavery of white women. This bill is a tribute to every pure and good
woman in this land’ (p. 83). Grittner observes that,
Russell’s heavy-handed linking of white women and black men was aimed at his fellow Southerners. A
vote against the Mann Act could be interpreted back home as a failure to prevent miscegenation and as an
incitement to black men. The debate occurred at a significant time in the South, when the Jim Crow laws
[legal segregation] were firmly in place and the white communities were still filled with sexual fears about
black men (p. 95).
106
Crittenton decried a Missouri law that declared that ‘a woman of immoral life was debarred
from giving testimony in the courts of that state, as the fact of her immorality prevented her
from being a credible witness’ (Crittenton 1910: 135).85 Yet, in the trial, Belle’s immorality was
rubbed out by the colour of her white skin. Her whiteness was enough to convince the jury of
Johnson’s guilt. Though a ‘hardened prostitute’, she symbolised the purity of white
womanhood that needed to be avenged: through Johnson’s blackness, she was transformed
into a piteous white slave. It is a horrible irony that Johnson, whose parents were slaves, was
himself convicted of being a slaver in the acting out of this perverse melodrama.
That white slavery was the axe that felled Johnson could not be more significant.
Progressive reformers had prize fighting down on their list of societal ills: like drinking,
gambling, and prostitution, high-minded concern with social welfare went had in hand with
repressive moralism. Roberts records that Progressive reformers considered prize fighting to
be un-American, ‘prize fighting, they argued, was as alien to those [traditional, rural American]
values as an illiterate Jewish immigrant from Russia’ (p. 93). Prize fighting was ‘an immigrant
sport that attracted Irish and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and other undesirable sorts’(p.93).
It is striking how similar these sentiments are to those linking immigration to prostitution
through the trope of white slavery. Johnson’s role in the melodrama of white slavery illustrates
perfectly the fear of disorder expressed in the myth. Johnson himself symbolised many of the
anxieties of the Progressive era. Johnson was a symbol squared: all of his attributes and
characteristics worked together to amplify the symbolic significance: the black man, the black
boxer, the lover of white women: disorder upon chaos upon dissolution and devastation. As
Roberts records: ‘He embodied the white man’s nightmare of racial chaos’ (p. 6).
Immigration and white slavery
Haag (1999) and Hobson (1987) are partially correct in their observations about the concern of
campaigners for ‘non-white’ women involved in the trade. Immigrant women did feature in
many campaigns around white slavery. As with other symbolic placings in the myth, the
immigrant woman took up an ambiguous, even paradoxical, position. On the one hand, the
immigrant woman’s plight was seen as the result of the backwardness of their own culture, and
85
This was again an anomaly: Grittner (1990) records that sentences under the Mann Act were lighter when the
woman was already a prostitute.
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the failure of immigrants to successfully adopt or adapt to American ‘civilisation’. On the
other, the helpless immigrant girl served as a powerful symbol of outrage for campaigners
against the low wages and poor living conditions of immigrants. The mythical tide of
immigrant prostitution was used both by those who championed the cause of immigrants, and
those who sought to keep them out.
The nature of immigration to America changed dramatically in the Progressive years. Whereas
19th century immigration was mostly from Northern Europe and Scandinavia, the new century
saw the arrival of increasing numbers of Southern Europeans, Russians, and the AustroHungarian empire. Connelly calls the arrival of ‘over thirteen million immigrants’ between
1900 and 1914 ‘one of the most profound social and demographic transformations in
American history’ (p. 48). These changes inspired a range of reactions across the spectrum of
American politics. Haag divides these reactions into two principal camps: ‘one that espoused a
romantic-racial “uplift” of the immigrant to citizenship and another that endorsed the
exclusion of “savage” races’ (p. 95): or, an ‘assimilationist’ and a ‘eugenicist’ tendency. The
official and public reaction to white slavery took shape in conversation with both of these
tendencies. These tendencies still prevail in much discussion of migration today, and hence we
can put down another signpost here: the supposed threat to the nation by immigrants is one of
the most potent aspects of the contemporary trafficking myth.
According to Grittner (1990), vice reform in America did not really catch fire until the myth of
white slavery turned the blame for America’s moral downfall onto a network of immigrants
engaged in the traffic in women. ‘Muckraking’ journalist George Kibbe Turner was a key figure
in setting up this interpretive framework, which was judicially fixed in the US Immigration Act
of 1910 and the 1910 White Slave (Mann) Act (Connelly 1980, Grittner 1990). In two articles
in McClure’s Magazine (G. K. Turner 1907, 1909) he linked corruption in city politics in
Chicago and New York to a network of foreigners, primarily Jews, whose nefarious deals
included white slavery. Turner was successful in arousing mass concern for the issue of white
slavery through combining it with other Progressive concerns: ‘By nimble transpositions
Turner placed virtually all aspects of urban corruption and political chicanery that interested
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middle-class, Progressive reformers in conversation with one another through the interlocutor
of white slavery’ (Haag 1999: 68).
Anti-Semitism was a common theme in anti-white slavery tracts, reflecting the Anti-Semitism
that was prevalent in the Progressive years. According to Connelly (1980), George Kibbe
Turner ‘expressed most fully’ the anti-Semitic outlook, detailing ‘the cabalistic machinations of
the caftan-cloaked latter-day Shylocks…without documentation or the mention of sources’ (p.
62). His report on Chicago blamed Russian Jews for supplying women for prostitution in
Chicago (Turner 1907). Daughters of the Poor, his 1909 article on New York, allegedly uncovered
the links between international Jewish white slavery rings and corruption in New York’s
Tamany Hall, centre of the Democratic Government of the city and a by-word for political
corruption. When railing against the spread throughout the country of New York Jewish
‘cadets’ (young men, connected to Tammany Hall, who supposedly lured young women into
white slavery), he evokes with chilling prescience images of insects or rats who needed to be
exterminated: ‘To-day they are strong in all the greater cities, they swarm at the gateway of the
Alaskan frontier at Seattle; they infest the streets and restaurants of Boston; they flock for the
winter to New Orleans…they abound in South and Southwest, and in the mining regions of
the West’ (p.52). This statement plays on the well-known anti-Semitic sentiment of the Jew as
pollutant, spreading his pestilence from the already corrupt New York throughout the rest of
America. This anti-Semitism, ‘the myth of a national Jewish conspiracy’ (Grittner 1990: 90) was
pervasive in the US Immigration Commission Report of 1909 (U.S. Senate 1909), which served
as a basis for the 1910 Immigration Act severely restricting immigration to the United States.86
Grittner (1990) claims that one of the effects of Turner’s work was to cement the perception
of the immigrant man as the white slaver, with the innocent American woman his helpless
victim: ‘Native-born women, not immigrant women, were presented as the chief victims. The
alien man assumed the role of villain’ (p. 63). While my reading of Turner supports Grittner’s
claim about immigrant men, I disagree about the victims of white slavery. In Turner’s antiTamanay hall diatribe, Jewish white slavers, and to a much lesser extent, Polish and French
86
The Jewish community was very sensitive to accusations of white slavery, and Jewish organisations were at the
forefront of anti-white slavery efforts. See Bristow 1982.
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traders, preyed nearly exclusively on women of their own nationality or ethnicity: ‘The victim
of the cadet is usually a young girl of foreign birth, who knows little or nothing of the
conditions of American life’ (G.K. Turner 1909: 49).
Beautiful, young, and innocent: poor little girl in the big bad city
white slavery is an existing condition – a system of girl hunting that is national and
international in its scope, that…literally consumes thousands of girls – Clean, innocent
girls, every year; that…is operated with a cruelly, a barbarism that gives a new meaning
to the word fiend; that…is an imminent peril to every girl in the country who has a
desire to get into the city and taste its excitements and its pleasures (Sims 1910a: 5).
Turner was convinced that immigrant Jewish girls from New York were the major source of
prostitutes throughout the US:
the East Side of New York, which has now grown, under this development, to be the
chief recruiting-ground for the so-called white slave trade in the United States, and
probably in the world. It can be exploited, of course, because in it lies the newest body
of immigrants and the greatest supply of unprotected young girls in the city (1909: 54).
Others, such as Chicago District Attorney Sims, were convinced that the number of foreign
girls were a ‘mere fraction’ of the number of American girls involved in the trade. Thus, while
the immigrant girl was the focus of concern, many were also concerned with that ‘flower of
American womanhood’: the country girl. White slavery narratives, such as those by Sims, are
full of dire warnings to parents of the dangers of the city for young, innocent girls fresh from
the country:
literally thousands of innocent girls from the country districts are every year entrapped
into a life of hopeless slavery and degradation because parents in the country do not
understand conditions as they exist and how to protect their daughters from the
"white slave" traders who have reduced the art of ruining young girls to a national and
international system (Sims 1910c: 48).
The fate of the white slave in the city carried metaphorical resonance in a number of
directions. As Connelly (1980) describes it, white slavery, the corruption of the innocent
American girl, came to symbolise the demise of rural America, all that was ‘pure and innocent’
in America.87 In many narratives, the city was portrayed as a place where foreign white slavers
87
Connelly’s (1980) reading of the narrative of ‘The true story of Estelle Ramon of Kentucky’, included in Bell’s
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls (1910), explores the metaphorical resonances of the ‘country girl in the city’.
110
lay in wait for the innocent American girl. Sims (1910b) describes the dangers of the ice cream
parlour:
a spider's web for her entanglement. This is especially true of those ice cream saloons
and fruit stores kept by foreigners…I believe that there are good grounds for the
suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is
often a recruiting station and a feeder for the "white slave" traffic (p. 71).
He claims that foreign proprietors of ice-cream parlours have a kind of 'free-masonry' among
them, so they can ‘pass girls along’. Sims concludes that 'the best and the surest way for
parents of girls in the country to protect them from the clutches of the "white slaver" is to
keep them in the country’ (p. 71).
Connelly (1980) writes that the foreign white slaver ‘assumed the role formerly occupied by the
Indian’ (p. 84) in the one of the literary precursors of the American white slavery myth: Indian
captivity stories. He argues that,
This depiction of the white slavers served several functions’ it is psychologically easier
to hate someone if they were racially ‘other’, but on a deeper level, it was the
‘projection of native America’s deepest sexual fear: immigrant males possessing the
daughters of the land while their men stand unable to help or protect (p.85).
Sim’s use of a ‘little red riding hood’ metaphor: 'their warfare upon virtue is as persistent, as
calculating, and as unceasing as was the warfare of the wolf upon the unprotected lamb of the
pioneer folk in the early days of the Western frontier’ (1910b: 68) exposes its meaning when
seen in the light of Connelly’s suggestion that the white slave metaphorically represented
‘virgin’ American territory.88
However, while I agree with Connelly in this interpretation, I do feel that it limits the various
meaning that the simple melodramatic theme of ‘young girl in the big city’ had for its various
audiences. It was not only American country girls who met fates as ‘white slaves: the worse
fate that can befall a woman’ (1910b: 68) in the big bad city. Newly arrived immigrant girls
were also seen as likely to meet their downfall in the urban mire. The country girl and the
newly arrived immigrant shared the narrative characteristics of youth, beauty, innocence,
mobility, and a lack of parental supervision.
88
Sims (1910) is very fond of the wolf and lamb metaphor, an example of the fairy-tale influences on the white
slave melodrama genre.
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‘Innocence lured, betrayed, destroyed’: (paradise lost)
The stress on the beauty of the victim is a common feature of white slavery narratives. These
physical descriptions function both as a mildly salacious stimulant and to provide narrative
contrast with the tragic, wasted figure at the end of the tale: as in a fairy tale, goodness is
associated with beauty and ugliness with evil and immorality.89 Sims (1910b) describes a
country girl returned home by Ernest A. Bell of the Illinois Vigilance Association:
They, however, welcomed a very different person from the pretty girl who went out
from that home to make her way in the big city. She was pitifully wasted by the life
which she had led, and her constitution is so broken down that she cannot reasonably
expect many years of life, even under the tenderest care. What is still worse, the fact
cannot be denied that her moral fibre is shattered and the work of reclamation must
be more than physical (p. 67).
Bell, with the lush rhetoric common to many white slavery narratives, contributes a story to
the same volume:
These murderous traffickers drink the heart’s blood of weeping mothers while they
eat the flesh of their daughters, by living and fattening themselves on the destruction
of the girls. Disease and debauch quickly blast the beauty of these lovely victims.
Cannibals seem almost merciful in comparison with the white slavers, who murder the
girls by inches (1910a: 75).
Often, the beautiful innocent pays with her life: racked with disease (assumed to be syphilis,
but rarely mentioned by name), she decries from her hospital bed her slaver and praises the
good reformer who tells her tale.90 A photographs series in Bell’s Fighting the Traffic (E. A. Bell
1910b) illustrates perfectly the ‘Harlot’s Progress’ from innocence, through ruin, to death. The
captions in the text itself describe the first two photos: ‘Daisy at fourteen’, above a photo of
‘Daisy at seventeen “Young and so Fair”’ with these words underneath: ‘The top picture shows
a pure, winsome girl of fourteen going to school in a little country town. The bottom one is
the same girl who left her home town to take a position in the city. The man she trusted
89
A notable exception to the narrative equation between beauty and virtue is provided by Ophelia Amigh,
Superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls (a reformatory). She recounts the story of Nellie, ‘a very
ordinary looking girl and below the average of intelligence, but as tractable and obedient as she is ingenuous. She
is wholly without the charm which would naturally attract the eye of the white slave trader’ (1910: 123). Nellie’s
obedient nature meant she was allowed to leave the ‘Training School for Girls’ and take up work as a housemaid.
From here the story follows familiar paths, and Nellie ends up in a Chicago house of shame: ‘How she was found
and rescued is a story quite apart from the purpose which has led me to tell of this incident – that of indicating
how tightly the slave traders have their nets spread for even the most ordinary and unattractive prey. They let no
girl escape who they dare to approach! (1910: 123).
90 Disease, especially syphilis, was a power metaphor in its own right. The diseased body of the prostitute
symbolised the contagion of society (Walkowitz 1980, Bell 1994, Nead 1988).
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deceived her’ (photo next to p. 99). The next photo in the series shows a cropped-headed girl
in an institutional bed, with the caption: ‘Daisy under twenty, dying in the poor-house. Less
than three years after leaving her home she was found in the poor-house, forgotten by (sic)
and friends, and dying of a loathsome disease’ (photo next to p. 146). The next photo shows a
funeral carriage on the street: ‘Daisy’s lonely funeral paid for by charity. The charity nurses
took up a subscription and saved her from the potter’s field. No flowers. No friends. No
relatives. Only the undertaker and his assistants’ (photo next to p. 147).
The horror and titillation of white slave narratives was magnified by stressing the youth of the
victim. Youth and beauty combined to produce a delectably innocent victim. Bell (E. A. Bell
1910a) recounts the story of a white slave rescued in Chicago from the ‘den’ of the ‘notorious
French trader and his wife, Alphonse and Eva Dufour (p. 75):
In this glittering den, with its walls and ceiling of mirrors, was a sweet Russian girls,
perhaps sixteen years old, whose fate made my heart bleed. She was of the best
Russian type, blonde, of medium height, peach-blossom complexion, roundish, and of
exceedingly gentle and loving disposition (p. 75).
This lingering description links racial stereotypes to beauty and sexual attractiveness, as does
Sims (1910b) in his tale of ‘a little Italian peasant girl’:
At this time she was about sixteen years old, innocent and rarely attractive for a girls
of her class, having the large, handsome eyes, the black hair and the rich olive skin of
a typical Italian (p. 55).
This ‘pretty victim’s’ loss of virtue is paralleled by her violent disfigurement: in an attempt to
escape she is slashed with a razor that disfigures her completely so that 'to look upon her is to
shudder' (p. 56).
Sims tells the above tale as if he had personally met the girl and heard her story (which would
make it impossible to know she was once pretty), a typical narrative device in the white slavery
stories, lending authenticity to the melodrama. Even more ‘authentic’ are the first-person tales
from the ‘victims’ themselves, such as ‘A White Slave’s Own Story’, a letter supposedly written
to Earnest A. Bell from a victim of the French traders. The letter begins with a description of
the victims: ‘Here we were, always from fifteen to eighteen girls, most of us very young’ (p. 77)
traces their fate, and ends with expressions of gratitude to the good men who saved them:
Some one ought to do his duty and make war on those horrid men. They simply take
girls for their slaves in all the country. For even if we are weak, some one with courage
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ought to help us not to be persuaded by those men. I am certainly glad that all the
men are not bad, that some one (sic) takes our part. You can be sure that most of the
girls are happy that some one came to make us strong (E. A. Bell 1910a: 78).
It was by no means only men who lingered on the youth and beauty of the victim, Florence
Mabel Dedrick, a rescue worker in Chicago, wrote:
One father, not long ago, after some striking warnings, wrote saying he had been
aroused to inquire after his little girl, her letters had been more and more
infrequent…When rescued, it was a girl with a blighted, pitifully wasted life, a sad
return, indeed, to the old home. Once a pretty pure, innocent girl. I find a majority of
girls gone astray are from the county towns, villages and hamlets. There is need for the
small communities to awake (Dedrick 1910).
The Minataur’s labyrinth
In white slavery narratives, as shown in chapter three, the moral geography of the city was
hazardous for the young girl, and the places that might lead to her irredeemable loss very
numerous. A drawing in Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls (E. A. Bell 1910b) shows the blazing
door of a dance-hall, with a young women poised outside. It is captioned,
Dangerous amusements – the brilliant entrance to hell itself. Young girls who have
danced at home a little are attracted by the blazing lights, gaiety and apparent
happiness of the “dance halls,” which in many instances leads to their downfall (across
from p. 35).
Other ‘dangerous amusements’ that parents are urged to be continually on guard against
include ‘five-cent theatres’, amusement parks, and ‘restaurants selling wines and liquors where
many young girls go as waitresses, which hold dangers for any girl’ (Dedrick 1910: 11) and of
course the foreign-run ice cream parlour and fruit store. Clifford Roe warned that,
so many and varied are the ways of procuring girls that it is quite impossible to tell all
of them…Schools for manicuring, houses for vapor and electric baths, large
steamboats running between the city and summer resorts, amusement parks, the
nickel theaters, the rooms in the depots and stores are all haunts and procuring places
for the white slave traders (1910: 173).
In white slavery stories, the American countryside and the foreign land both figured as a sort
of pre-lapserian rural idyll, a garden of Eden whose expulsion is guaranteed by the serpent of
sexual knowledge. Often, the tales have the ‘serpent’ himself visiting the garden to tempt the
innocent young beauty with the apple of an easy life and pretty clothes. In other tales, such as
that of that of Sims’ ‘little Italian peasant girl’, the tempter is a woman:
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'A “fine lady” who wore beautiful clothes came to her where she lived with her
parents, made friends with her, told her she was uncommonly pretty (the truth, by the
way), and professed a great interest in her.91 Such flattering attentions from an
American lady who wore clothes as fine as those of the Italian nobility could have but
one effect on the mind of this simple little peasant girl and on her still simpler parents.
Their heads were completely turned and they regarded the "American lady" with
almost adoration’ (1910: 54).
In these stories, a complicated tale of American pride and American shame is being told. The
‘American lady’ is presented in sharp contrast to the backward peasants, and ‘free America’ is
seen as the quite natural desire of any foreign girl. On the other hand, this innocence is
destroyed once it reaches the promised land, as America fails to live up to her promise:
What mockery it is to have in our harbor in New York the statue of Liberty with
outstretched arms welcoming the foreign girl to the land of the free!…What a travesty
to wrap the flag of America around our girls and extol virtue and purity, freedom and
liberty, and then not raise a hand to protect our own girls who are being procured by
white slave traders every day! (Roe 1910: 153).
Other tales of foreign girls in peril focus on the debased cultural practices of other countries,
exhorting foreigners to reach American standards and decrying Americans who themselves fail
to uphold American values. Even if the immigrant woman in a narrative lacked the literal
whiteness of skin, she still partook of symbolic whiteness: partially through her child-like
sexual innocence, but most significantly, by her positioning opposite the ‘dark’ slave trader.
There is no more depraved class of people in the world than those human vultures
who fatten on the shame of innocent young girls. Many of these white slave traders
are recruited from the scum of the criminal classes of Europe. And in this lies the
revolting side of the situation. On the one hand the victims, pure, innocent,
unsuspecting, trusting young girls – not a few of them mere children. On the other
hand, the white slave trader, low, vile, depraved and cunning – organically a criminal
(1910a: 16).
The foreign white slave trader is one so foul that he would not hesitate to apprehend and ruin
women of his own ‘race’:
91
As I indicated when this story is first mentioned above, Sims is carried on the wave of rhetorical enthusiasm to
the point of narrative unreliability. As the story is recounted, the ‘little Italian peasant girl’ is telling her tale to
sympathetic listeners, including Assistant US District Attorney Parkin, the prosecutor in the Jack Johnson case
who hoped Johnson’s conviction would lead to laws against miscegenation. The ‘little Italian peasant’, arrested in
the Chicago brothel raids due to enforcement of the 1907 Immigration Act, at first, ‘like most of the others taken
in the raids, stoutly maintained that …she was in a life of shame from choice and not through the criminal act of
any person’ (p. 54). However, after being interrogated and persuaded of the good intentions of Parkins and
company, she ‘broke down and with pitiful sobs related her awful narrative. That every word of it was true no one
could doubt who saw her as she told it’ (p. 54). Descriptions of her beauty from the standpoint of Sims who ‘saw
her as she told it’ provide a fine narrative contrast with her horrible disfigurement later on.
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The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the very moment when she is least
able to defend herself. Such a girl, already bewildered by the change from an old world
village to an American city…Those discouraged and deserted (by lovers) girls become
an easy prey for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers
(Addams 1912: 28).
The discourse of the oppression of immigrant women by immigrant men was linked to notions
of citizenship in narratives of immigrant prostitution and concurrent concerns about
fraudulent, ‘forced’ marriage (Haag 1999). Between men and women of the same ‘lower race’,
tales of sexual coercion re-affirmed of superior morals of the white American, national
community.
Feminism and white slavery in America
As in Britain, feminists were a major force in the campaigns against prostitution in turn of the
century America, including in anti white-slavery campaigns. Feminists, too, took up the anticorruption line in campaigns against prostitution and campaigns for political enfranchisement.
As in England, female sexual purity was translated into a higher moral sensibility in all things,
including politics. Women’s ‘good housekeeping’ was needed to clean up the corruption in
city, state, and national government. Paradoxically, women’s entrance into the public sphere
was predicated on the presumed moral conditions that kept her confined to home and hearth
in the first place (Elshtain 1974).
Feminists in America displayed the same ambiguous relationship with the figure of the
prostitute as did British and Continental feminists. A curious phrase from the inaugural
resolution of the New York Female Moral Reform Society; one of the first female anti-vice
societies, and dedicated to converting prostitutes and closing brothels in New York City,
encapsulates this ambivalence: ‘Resolved, That the licentious man is no less guilty than his
victim’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1985: 112). The notion of a ‘guilty victim’, oxymoronic as it may
sound to our ears, expresses perfectly how feminists (and others) struggled to harmonize their
moral impulse to condemn a woman’s loss of virtue with sympathy for her fall, as well as a
desire to make men share the guilt. The ambiguities in the feminist relationship to prostitutes
reflected tensions in Progressive ideology itself. Feminist desire to protect vulnerable girls –
primarily working class and immigrant – took shape through a disciplinary desire to control
‘wild’ tendencies. Desire to achieve equality for women partook of notions of women’s moral
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superiority. The work of women’s groups and prominent female campaigners highlights most
starkly the contradictory tendencies in anti white-slavery campaigns. These ambiguities in the
feminist response to prostitution persist in contemporary anti-trafficking efforts, with feminists
calls for protection of young women often voiced in terms of disciplinary actions, explored in
Chapter Five.
This ambiguity is clearly illustrated in the work of the notable US feminist campaigner, Jane
Addams. In her 1912 book on white slavery, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, Addams
argues forcefully against police harassment of prostitutes and for improved wages for working
women. While she relates with heart-rending pathos the stories of poor girls whose only hope
of feeding their families is by giving in to the blandishments of wicked men, she is scornful
and dismissive of those girls who would contemplate selling their virtue in slightly less
desperate circumstances:
Although economic pressure as a reason for entering an illicit life has thus been
brought out in court by the evidence in a surprising number of cases, there is no
doubt that it is often exaggerated; a girl always prefers to think that economic pressure
is the reason for her downfall, even when the immediate causes have been her love of
pleasure, her desire for finery, or the influence of evil companions (pp. 47, 60).
According to Addams, these moral failings supposedly made young working-class and
immigrant girls ‘easy prey’ for white slavers. What is certain is that belief in these girls’ innate
moral weakness made them the ideal target for the reforming impulses of middle-class
feminists.
In Chapter Four, I described how Walkowitz (1992) shows how Josephine Butler cast herself
as the loving and castigating Christian mother in the feminist melodrama of white slavery.
American ‘rescue work’ in prostitution was historically both Christian and female: ‘ ‘women
ministering to women’ was one of the few fitting activities for women in the Church’ (SmithRosenberg 1985: 72). In their writings, American Christian women tended to allocate
themselves roles as melodramatic heroines, gently but firmly taming the wild chaotic girl to
adopt the meek and grateful posture befitting her age and sex (Smith-Rosenberg 1985). A
common referent in American white slavery narratives, but especially those written by women,
is the Mother: her failure to protect her daughter must be compensated for by the intervention
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of mother-figure rescue workers. This is illustrated in a story by Chicago rescue missionary
Florence Mabel Dedrick:
The danger begins the moment a girl leaves the protection of Home and Mother. One
of these dangers, and the one that seems to be well nigh impossible for parents to
realize, is the fact that there are watchers or agents, who may be either men or women,
at our steamboat landings, railroad stations, everywhere, who seek attractive girls
evidently unused to city ways, try to make their acquaintance, using inducements and
deception of every conceivable kind, offers of helpfulness, showing her every
kindness. I remember so well one dear girl whom I found in Cook country Hospital,
brought there from a brothel, sold, led away, deceived, from another town, on the
promise of work, who said to me, “Every one in Chicago deceives you. No one told
me the truth until I met you. You are the first real friend I could trust” (1910: 109).
Mothers are exhorted to protect their daughters by Ophelia Amigh, Superintendent of the
Illinois Training School for Girls:
As one whose daily duty it is to deal with wayward and fallen girls, as one who has had
to dig down into the sordid and revolting details of thousands of these sad cases…let
me say to such mothers: In this day and age of the world no young girl is safe! And all
the young girls who are not surrounded by the alert, constant and intelligent
protection of those who love them unselfishly are in imminent and deadly peril. And
the more beautiful and attractive they are the greater is their peril! (1910: 119).
It is easy to see why anti-prostitution was such a potent symbol for early feminists and female
reformers. What more powerful way of denouncing a range of conditions that effected
women, the poor, children, immigrants than by connecting them with prostitution? The
prostitute could embody, not just a range of repressive anxieties, but progressive ones as well.
Prostitution and the harlot’s miserable end represented the ultimate horror that resulted from a
range of social ills that feminists were fighting against. What better way to decry the low wages
paid to women than with a story of a poor girl lured into degradation with oily promises of an
easy life and beautiful clothes? There was the department store – the symbol of the new urban
marketplace – with, on the one hand, all the consumer goods that young women desired, on
the other, their own low-paid position. What better way to argue against slum living for the
poor than to link these conditions to prostitution? Jane Addams argues that slum
overcrowding breaks down natural modesty of little girls, making it easier for them to go with
‘bad men’. What better way to condemn child labour than through the pitiful figure of the
sexually enslaved girl-child? How better to illustrate the need for the integration of immigrants
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– or to close borders to them – than through the figure of the naïve immigrant girls, tricked by
her own countryman into marriage, and then deserted and degraded?
In conversations with racialised discourses of the American nation, white slavery fears fostered
a range of feminist positions, some of which advocated eugenicist strategies for achieving racial
purity and feminine equality. Feminist-produced white slavery campaigns and narratives never
carried simply one message: often, they were ‘an uneasy admixture of progressive opinion and
eugenicist principle’ (Beer and Joslin 1999: 15). Beer and Joslin (1999) compare the work of
Jane Addams with that of her friend Charlotte Perkins Gilman to illustrate these conflicts in
feminist politics.
While Addam’s reforming work was concerned with the need to integrate immigrants, and to
bring them up to an American standard of morality, Gilman believed that moral purity was
linked genetically with race (Gilman 1991). Gilman combined her view of women’s role as
guardians of the species through the political space of their wombs with a condemnation of
the system of women’s economic independence. Gilman’s work, (as looked at by Beer and
Joslin) is a fine illustration of the way in women created Laclau’s necessary but impossible
‘fullness of the community’ through invocation of the white slavery myth. In Gilman’s story
His Mother (1981), the standard figures of white slavery this time enact a eugenics morality play:
‘Gilman’s message is clear: the body politic will be cleansed of its perversions and distortions if
women can refuse complicity in the accepted nexus of duty and sexual dependence and
reconfigure it so as put the species above the individual’ (Beer and Joslin 1999: 15).
Commercialisation: ‘The rise of the pimp system’
Hand in hand with a belief about the rise of the immigrant controlled ‘vice trust’ went beliefs
in the increased commercialisation of prostitution. This belief was an article of faith in white
slavery stories, mirrored in contemporary discourses of ‘nets’ and ‘rings’ of immigrantcontrolled organised crime: the ‘Yakuzas’, ‘Triads’ and mafias. The commercialisation of
contemporary prostitution is an ideological motif that serves any number of causes; from antiglobalisation advocates who point to it as the most egregious example of the excesses of global
capitalism, to American hawks who use it to justify America’s ‘war on terror’. These
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contemporary uses of the mythical mafia are explored in Chapter Five, and their genealogy is
examined below.
Hobson (1987) provides a good example of the belief in the increased commercialisation of
prostitution in the Progressive period. In this, she takes issue with the approach to white
slavery as a metaphor, as a ‘psychological clearinghouse for a host of social disorders’ (p.
140).92 While citing Connelly as the most ‘coherent and subtle’ (p. 140) practitioner of this
approach, she still indicts him for failing to take sufficient account of campaigners’ concern
with the ‘reality’ of prostitution. Hobson’s position is that white slavery discourses reflected
real changes in the prostitution economy. Chief among these changes, according to Hobson,
was the loss of control of the prostitution economy by women, or what she terms ‘the rise of
the pimp system’ (p. 139). What were the characteristics of the ‘pimp system’ identified by
Hobson? This rise involved a number of changes, most linked to the assumed growing
commercialisation of prostitution. According to this conception, prostitution was becoming
‘more rationalised and organised’ (p. 139), the role of middlemen was increasing, and there was
a ‘greater division of labour’ which encompassed ‘proprietors, pimps, madams, runners,
collectors…doctors, clothing dealers, and professional bondsmen’ (p. 139). As a result of this
deep commercialisation, women were supposedly less able to work independently: ‘Whereas in
the past prostitutes had had bully boys or lovers who often exploited them, buy the turn of the
century more and more prostitutes’ labor and wages were actively managed by pimps, who in
some cases arranged clients or installed women in particular brothels’ (p. 143).
Comparing Connelly (1980) and Hobson’s (1987) different interpretation of the matter of ‘the
rise of the pimp system’ is a good way of examining how myths around prostitution can retain
their performativity long after the social context in which they were active has changed. It is
worthwhile to linger here, for assertions about the growing horrors of pimping are a staple
feature of anti-prostitution campaigns to this day. First, Hobson overemphasises the symbolic
dimension in Connelly’s view of anti-prostitution. Though he sees anti-prostitution as a
metaphoric response to various social anxieties, he does not consider prostitution itself to be
'red herring': ‘The grim reality of the vice districts and of streetwalkers plying their trade along
92
The term ‘psychological clearinghouse’ is Connelly’s own (1980: 7).
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the thoroughfares was the immediate occasion of the progressive concern over prostitution,
and this study is in no way intended to minimize that basic truth’ (p. 6). Most interesting,
however, is that Connelly’s ‘psychological’ approach to a seminal white slavery document, the
Chicago Vice Commission Report (1911) exposes the ‘rise of the pimp system’ as a potent
myth in itself.93
The increasing control of prostitution by pimps was an essential element, and an article of
faith, in anti-prostitution and anti-white slavery campaigns. Connelly (1980) notes the concern
with commercialisation in the 1911 Chicago Vice Commission report, The Social Evil in Chicago:
'The first truth…is that fact that prostitution in this city is a Commercialized Business of large
proportions with tremendous profits of more than Fifteen Million Dollars per year, controlled
largely by men, not women’ (p. 32, emphasis in original). Clifford Roe argued that ‘The power
of free enterprise and competition had even reached the vice industry as cheaper sources of
supplying women became widespread’ (quoted in Grittner 1990: 67). For Connelly, this
‘ominous’ discovery was a symbol and symptom of other anxieties during the Progressive
years: the corruption of the ‘evil city’, the supposed fear of underground criminal networks
controlled by immigrants (vice-trusts) and the social dislocation during the Progressive years
due to the spread of factory labour and the consequent process of reification and alienation.94
One key difference between Hobson and Connelly is in their evaluation of source material.
Connelly recognises that ‘The voice speaking in The Social Evil in Chicago was…the voice of
specific, identifiable, powerful and established groups in Chicago’ (p. 99). He notes that there
were no representatives of prostitutes on the commission, the group ‘which might have been
the most knowledgeable about prostitution in the city…[it] was, thus, the official version of
prostitution in Chicago in the early twentieth century. This does not in any sense make it a less
important source; it simply makes it a certain kind of source, a qualification of no mean
93
This belief in ‘the rise of the pimp system’ is still extremely prevalent and powerful today. Many sex worker
activists oppose the use of the term ‘pimp’. Laws aimed to ‘stop pimping’ have routinely been turned against sex
workers, their lovers, business managers, and families. Stereotypes about the relationships between pimps and
prostitutes perpetuate the passive, damaged image of female sexuality and pathologise sex workers’ intimate
relationships. Furthermore, the ‘pimp’ image in the US and in Britain is constructed through racist notions about
the brutalness and hypersexuality of black men. See Pheterson 1987 and the articles about pimping at the NSWP
website, www.nswp.org.
94 See Stange (1998) for analysis of the theme of labour power, commodity exchange, and white slavery.
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importance’(p. 99, emphasis added). It is precisely this recognition of the location of the
authority contained in the Commission’s report that is missing in Hobson. ‘The rise of the
pimp system’, according to Hobson, ‘was documented in nearly every study of prostitution
during this period’ (p. 143). But what exactly were the nature of these studies? She relies
heavily on the Chicago Vice Commission Report and her main sources include Clifford Roe, a
key member of the Chicago Commission, whose manipulation of evidence was so blatant that
it was marked even by his contemporaries in the anti-prostitution movement (Connelly 1980).
Hobson casts no critical eye on these materials, and as a result, her analysis reflects the
assumptions and anxieties of those whose material she uses, rather than a critical evaluation of
them.
The lack of critical evaluation is especially striking in light of Hobson’s close reading of other
‘factual’ accounts of the day, such as social workers’ and doctors’ evaluations of prostitutes,
and testifies to the strength of the belief that prostitution is controlled by pimps. While
Hobson is most keen to stress the ‘real’, rather than the symbolic, nature of anti-prostitution
campaigns, she nonetheless acknowledges that there was a ‘symbolic content’ to the campaign,
‘particularly in its obsession with the white slave trade….White slavery as a metaphor captured
a prostitute's growing dependence on a manager/pimp and her loss of the freedom to move in
and out of prostitution-to work part time or seasonally' (p. 141,144). In her attempt to resuture the gap between ‘actual conditions in prostitution’ and campaigner’s concerns in white
slavery, however, she takes the 'rise of the pimp system' as the actual real 'event' that white
slavery reflected, rather than seeing both the rise of the pimp and the fear of white slavery as
two aspects of the same myth.95
Metaphor and myth redux
Throughout the above examination of the American genealogy of white slavery, I have
signposted the links to today’s trafficking debates. I have explored white slavery at such length
so that it might become easier to decode the discursive statements that masquerade as
descriptions of reality in today’s discussions of trafficking. For example, reading that lack of
95
The image of ‘the vice trust’ was an analogy to other, corporate trusts, which were linked to graft and
corruption in the city. While Hobson unquestioningly accepts the myth of ‘the rise of the pimp system’, she does
contest the interpretation of it as a ‘vice trust’. Rather than ‘a highly organised prostitution empire in the hands of
few vice moguls’, she argues that prostitution was controlled by an ‘informal network’ of immigrants (1987: 145).
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parental protection was a cause of white slavery can help us see claims about the lack of proper
parenting in the third world as more than simply inaccurate or discriminatory. The purpose of
the examination, however, was not only to lay the groundwork for drawing parallels between
white slavery and trafficking, but to establish more completely the framework of myth for
looking at trafficking, taken up in the following chapters.
The purpose of the first section of the thesis has been to use theoretical perspectives
developed by historians to interrogate current debates; to investigate accounts of white slavery
as performatives, as ideology, as myth; and to set out an interpretive framework for
understanding trafficking in women. In short, using the past to inform understandings of the
present. The second section of the thesis, which takes the international as the level of analysis
for understanding the myth of trafficking in women, will also inform our understanding of the
past. This will set up a two-way conversation. The concepts of myth, narrative, and metaphor,
and the various meanings of the white slave myth expressed in these devices, will be used in
the following section to examine trafficking in women.
Up to this point, the thesis has examined the myth of white slavery by looking at its effects in
one country, foregrounding ‘narrative’ in a look at Great Britain, and foregrounding ‘metaphor’
in a look at the United States. In this, the thesis follows the form of the histories of white
slavery. These histories examine the myth of white slavery in a national context, and explain its
appeal, strength and believability through the particular, political/social configurations in each
country.96 So, as we have seen, for the US, Connelly (1980) gives particular explanatory weight
to the American Progressive ethos, while Haag (1999) highlights the inter-meshing of
discourses of sexuality and liberalism. In the UK, Nead (1988) and Walkowitz (1980, 1992)
emphasize class, while Burton (1994, 1998) examines the effect of colonialism.
Considering that histories of white slavery have chosen in the main to focus on the myth in
one country, it would seem at first glance that a major difference between then and now is this
international nature of the current discourse. However, the myth of white slavery was not
96Bristow
focus.
(1982) is an exception, his history of the Jewish experience of ‘white slavery’ takes a multi-country
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limited by national borders, and it was not only in Great Britain and the US that the myth
flourished. Throughout Europe, to the colonial administrations in Asia, and in Brazil and
Argentina, the myth of white slavery mobilised private concern and led to changes in national
law. This transnational concern also led to international organisations and international
conventions. Most historians do note that the concern with white slavery went beyond any
national borders. A number mention the role of private organisations and governments in their
country of focus in international action and legislation against the white slave trade. Yet, there
is relatively little examination of the myth at transnational level. This leads us to the question of
the significance of the international in the myth of white slavery and trafficking. What does it
do to the analysis if the international aspect is foregrounded? The second half of this thesis
takes the international as its level of analysis, looking beyond national borders at international,
global, social/political conditions that contextualise the myth of trafficking in women.
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Chapter Five: ‘Prevent, protect and punish’
‘The men who consort with vile women lose their respect for all women…Harlots and
their patrons are the worst enemies in every way that good women can have’ (Bell 1910:
267, 268).
In the preceding chapters, I have resisted approaching the myth of white slavery as a
timeless and static ‘ur’ story. Rather, I have sought to comprehend the myth as narrative
yoked to history, and to illuminate the ways in which the social and political context
imbued the myth with meaning. This approach presents some difficulties for a comparative
analysis. It would have been much more simple for a diachronic analysis to establish a
single, static, prototypical white slavery myth to set out as a template to fit elements of the
current trafficking myth into. The ‘bare bones’ of the simple melodramatic tale of feminine
virtue destroyed by masculine evil does indeed inform narratives and political accounts of
trafficking. Yet, as with white slavery, the myth of trafficking is also about much more. It is
within the negotiations – where trafficking was defined by both what literally appeared in
the text and also, crucially, by what was left out – that the myth reveals its performative
power.
This chapter investigates the ways in which the white slave haunts the halls of the UN in
Vienna. It begins with an exploration of the use of ‘consent’ in early 20th century anti
white-slavery agreements, and then moves to the negotiations around the 2000 Trafficking
Protocol. The Human Rights Caucus focused much of their lobby efforts on convincing
state delegates of the need for strong human rights protections for trafficking victims. This
chapter takes a detailed look at the way delegates responded to our efforts, and shows how
the Protocol veers between treating the ‘trafficked woman’ as both a victim and a criminal.
I examine how the CATW lobby positioned the ‘trafficking victim’ in their lobby efforts. I
argue that the lobby efforts of CATW, while ostensibly seeing the prostitute purely as a
victim, actually worked to enhance the treatment of the prostitute as a criminal by states.
Interrupting the innocent victim
Both nationally and internationally, state response to white slavery was configured around
the twin figures of the prostitute as chaos bringer and as defiled innocent. The identity that
these responses attempted to pin down and fix in law was dominated by the need to define
125
white slavery. The tension between the white slave as innocent victim and anarchic border
crosser became most clear in those arenas, in which states attempted to reach agreement
with each other over the conditions under which their own nationals would be treated in
other countries, and how they would treat other states’ nationals.
Wijers and Lap-Chew (1997), in their study of trafficking, have used the phrase ‘from
‘coercion’ to ‘even with her consent’ (p. 23) to describe the shift in the way white slavery is
defined in pre-WWII international agreements. In 1899, the first international congress of
voluntary anti-white slavery organisations took place in London. International regulationist
groups, purity groups, prohibitionists and abolitionists met to debate what sort of
international measures were needed to end 'white slavery'. This congress called upon states
to enter into international agreements to stop the trade. The first international agreement
against ‘white slavery’ was drafted in 1902 in Paris and signed in 1904 by 13 states.97 Largely
due to the input of regulationist countries such as France, this International Agreement for the
Suppression of the White Slave Trade did not equate ‘white slavery’ with ‘prostitution’. Bristow
(1977), in his examination of the development of the international agreements,
demonstrates that they were a compromise between countries, such as the Netherlands and
Germany, who had adopted an abolitionist position in response to domestic fears about
white slavery, and those such as France that remained regulationist. As he remarks:
The French always showered the white-slavery movement with attention in order
to demonstrate the human face of state regulation…there was considerable
willingness to fulfil the spirit of the agreements. In regulationist countries it was a
noncontroversial way to demonstrate a progressive attitude’(p. 181, 183).
Accordingly, the 1904 agreement only addresses the fraudulent or abusive recruitment of
women for prostitution in another country.
This agreement set the tone for two subsequent (supplementary) international agreements.
In 1910, The International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic broadened the
scope of the crime to include recruitment for prostitution within national boundaries.
According the this Convention, a white-slaver was one who:
to gratify the passions of others, hired, abducted or enticed for immoral purposes,
even with her consent, a woman or girl under twenty years of age, or over that age
in case of violence, threats, fraud or any compulsion (United Nations 1959 in
Derks 2000).
97
France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium,
Holland, Spain, Portugal, Norway and Switzerland.
126
What is notable in this definition is that for 'a woman or girl under 20', consent was
nullified. For women of the majority age of 21, however, force or deception must have
been used for the act to be considered 'white slavery'. The 1921 International Convention to
Combat the Traffic in Women and Children, adopted by the League of Nations, marked the
change of language from ‘white slavery’ to ‘traffic in women’, as well as including children
of both sexes.98
It was not until 1933 that an international agreement was drafted that reflected the
abolitionist position, that is, that a woman’s consent was irrelevant when a ‘third party’ was
involved in recruitment and movement for prostitution. The 1933 International Convention for
the Suppression of the Traffic in Women condemned all recruitment for prostitution in another
country. It obliges states to punish: ‘Any person who, in order to gratify the passions of
another person, procures, entices or leads away, even with her consent, a woman or a girl
of full age for immoral purposes to be carried out in another country’ (in Wijers and LapChew 1997).99 If we compare this definition with the one above from the 1910 agreement,
we see the significance: 'even with her consent' has shifted. No longer does it serve to mark
the distinction between the consensual capacity of children and adults. The definition
changes: from 'even with her consent, a woman or girl under 20 years of age' to 'even with
her consent, a woman or a girl of full age'.
Yet, this agreement only partially adopted the abolitionist position. The phrase 'even with
her consent' only applied to international traffic, thus again leaving national regulationist
systems intact. This meant that while an adult women was deemed capable of 'consent' to
prostitution within her own country, she could not consent to travel to another country to
do so. This situation was resolved in the 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in
Women and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which fully enshrined the abolitionist
position. In its preamble, it states that:
trafficking and the accompanying evil of the traffic in persons for the purpose of
prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and
endanger the welfare of the individual, the family and the community (UN 1949).
Wijers and Lap-Chew (1997) track the tricky transpositions of consent in the 1949
Convention:
98
See Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997 and Haveman 1998
The abolitionist position continued to dominate international law until the 1980s, when a number of
agreements began to recognise a distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ prostitution. See Doezema 1998.
99
127
art. 1 of the …convention obliges State Parties to punish any person who ‘to
gratify the passions of another’:
1] Procurers, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person, even with the
consent of that person;
With this paragraph the previous distinction between international and national
"trafficking" disappears: in both cases now "trafficking" is punishable even with
the consent of the woman concerned. Moreover, in the following articles the
scope of the convention is broadened to include the exploitation of prostitution by
calling State Parties to punish anyone who:
2]Exploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person
3] Keeps or manages, or knowingly finances or takes part in the financing of a brothel;
4] Knowingly lets or rents a building or other place or any other part thereof for the purpose of the
prostitution of others (p. 2, emphasis in original).
The fact that the abolitionist position was not fully enshrined in international law until the
furore around white slavery that led to the sequence of international treaties had subsided
deserves further examination. Historians are agreed that the international concern with
white slavery had all but disappeared with the advent of WWI. According to Roberts
(1992), by the time the League of Nations adopted the 1921 convention: 'the issue no
longer had the power to stir up the populace or the authorities…The 'white slave' myth
remained a minor theme of popular melodrama, surfacing in many lurid films, for instance,
but it had already done its worst in the hearts and minds of the people' (p. 279).100
Why did the 1933 and 1949 Conventions extend and then fully embrace the abolitionist
position? One reason is that, while public concern about 'white slavery' had died away, state
and public concern about prostitution had not. The advent of WW1 marked an increase in
state repression of prostitution throughout Europe and the US – meaning state repression
of prostitutes – as prostitutes were blamed for spreading disease and ruining the moral of
the troops (Roberts 1992). Hobson (1987) gives a truly fascinating and horrifying account
of the degree of persecution suffered by prostitutes in the US, who were viewed as a
security threat. In the inter-war period, regulationist systems went out of favour as
toleration of prostitution decreased.
Yet, the question still remains to be answered, why did these Conventions take an
abolitionist position, rather than a prohibitionist one? It is because, as Corbin (1990)
argues, prohibitionism and abolitionism were actually closer together than they might
appear. Both approaches wanted to get rid of prostitution, and as such, were arrayed
100Roberts
(1992) argues that the League of Nations concern with white slavery in 1921 was the result of
migration routes used by prostitutes, including Jews escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
128
together against regulationism, which tolerated prostitution. Though abolitionists claimed
to absolve the female prostitute from blame, their position was, as explored in Chapter
Four, actually quite ambiguous towards prostitutes, often blaming the prostitute herself for
her condition. The repression of prostitutes under abolitionist laws formulated in response
to white slavery is well-documented, for example by Roberts (1992) and Walkowitz (1980).
Many of these laws are still in place, causing extreme hardship for sex workers, and thus are
the target of much sex worker activism.
It is also the case that prohibitionists, when campaigning against white slavery, had
discovered how useful it was to adopt abolitionist language of 'protecting women' and
'saving women' in their arguments. Bell referred in florid terms to the 1904 Convention as
'The Woman's Charter' (E.A. Bell 1910: 200) With their mutual desire to see an end to
prostitution and their ambiguous attitudes towards prostitutes, abolitionists and
prohibitionists formed natural allies in the fight against regulation and white slavery. As we
shall see in Chapter Seven, they continue to do so in the fight against trafficking.
After the 1949 Convention, no new international agreement specifically addressing
trafficking appeared until the Protocol. However, trafficking and prostitution have been
addressed in an increasing number of UN resolutions, declarations and statements. As I
demonstrated in an earlier paper (Doezema 1998), the abolitionist position continued to
hold sway at the international level until the mid 1980s. My examination of relevant UN
instruments showed that in the mid '80s, there was a general (if uneven) shift away from
abolitionist mechanisms towards those that recognise the capacity for adult women to
consent to sex work. This is demonstrated by the adoption of language in these agreements
that condemns only ‘forced’ prostitution, rather than prostitution per se. It would seem as if
history was circling around itself – at one moment granting adult women consent, at
another taking it away. Yet, the arguments used to re-assign to adult women the capacity
for consent to prostitution had shifted subtly under the influence of feminism, sex worker
rights movements, and the politics of Aids. The ‘old’ regulationist position had as its
bedrock the idea that prostitution was 'a necessary evil', and that a certain group of women,
who 'consented' to be prostitutes, had to be put under extra state discipline and control. As
examined in Chapter One, the 'new' feminist/sex worker position argues that prostitution
was a profession: and that women and men who choose prostitution should be recognised
129
as workers and given labour rights.101 However, while the underlying view of sex work and
women's sexuality was radically different in this position, arguments continued to be
framed in terms of ‘consent’.
The Protocol on Trafficking in Persons: background
The 2000 Trafficking Protocol is a subsidiary treaty or ‘Optional Protocol’ to the United
Nations Convention on Transnational Organised Crime. The body charged by the UN
General Assembly with the task of developing this Convention was the UN Centre for
International Crime Prevention (also called the Crimes Commission), located in Vienna.
The ‘main convention’ was negotiated during the same period as the Trafficking Protocol.
The Convention also had two other ‘additional instruments’, one related to weapons
smuggling (Arms Protocol) and one related to smuggling of migrants (Smuggling
Protocol).102 The first drafts of the Protocol were submitted by the United States and
Argentina, who had taken the lead in the development of this instrument.103
The negotiations took place between January 1999 and October 2000, with eleven sessions
in total. The Trafficking Protocol was discussed at eight of these sessions. Over 100
countries sent delegations to the negotiations. They were also attended by representatives
of NGOs, including our lobby group, and representatives of other UN organisations
including the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Migration Organisation and the
101
For documentation of the sex worker rights movement, see P. Alexander and F. Delacoste (eds.),
1987, Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press; G. Pheterson, 1989
(ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, Seattle, WA: Seal Press; W. Chapkis, 1997, Live Sex Acts:
Women Performing Erotic Labor, New York: Routledge; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998.
102 While it is fairly clear how ‘smuggling of migrants’ and ‘trafficking in persons’ might be addressed in
the same instrument, the questions of ‘weapons’ might not be so readily apparent. The link is the
connection between all three and the subject of the ‘main convention’: organised crime. The delegations
were unable to reach consensus on the Arms Protocol, and it was abandoned during the final session.
103 From the UN General Assembly Resolution calling for the Convention:
On the recommendation of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice and the
Economic and Social Council (Council resolution 1998/14 of 28 July 1998), the General Assembly
adopted resolution 53/111 of 9 December 1998, in which it decided to establish an open-ended
intergovernmental ad hoc committee for the purpose of elaborating a comprehensive international
convention against transnational organized crime and of discussing the elaboration, as appropriate,
of international instruments addressing trafficking in women and children, combating the illicit
manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, their parts and components and ammunition, and
illegal trafficking in and transporting of migrants, including by sea. In its resolution 53/114 of 9
December 1998, the Assembly called upon the Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of a
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime to devote attention to the drafting of the main
text of the convention, as well as of the above-mentioned international instruments (UNGA 2000).
130
International Labour Organisation. All sessions were translated into official UN languages
using simultaneous interpretation.
The eleven sessions were a mixture of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ meetings. Formal sessions
were the place where the main negotiating occurred. As NGOs we were allowed to attend
the formal sessions as observers, make use of the simultaneous translation, and sit in the
back of the room while the delegates discussed the instruments. The actual negotiations
took place only between state delegations. Like other international treaties, negotiations
were aimed at achieving consensus among delegates as to the wording of the text, in order
that the largest number of states would be able to commit themselves to being bound by
the final document. NGOs and representatives of other bodies were given the opportunity
to address the sessions with prepared statements, but did not intervene in discussions
between delegations.104 In order to influence the proceedings, we relied on speaking to
delegates between sessions and giving them our documents. If we urgently wanted to speak
to a delegate while a formal session was taking place, we would creep quietly over to where
the delegate was sitting and hand her a slip of paper with our comments on it, or whisper a
suggested intervention in her ear.
The informal sessions were added to the agenda when it became obvious that the time
allocated in formal sessions would not be enough to finalise the Protocol, because delegates
could not agree on the definition of ‘trafficking’. Informal sessions were intended only to
clarify the language in the text that was being negotiated, and not to make any substantial
revisions to the text. The power to clarify, however, proved to be very influential to the
final outcome of the Protocol, as examined in chapter eight. The addition of informal
sessions caused controversy. A number of countries, especially developing countries,
objected that they were effectively barred from an important sphere of influence, as these
sessions were not translated and involved additional expense to delegates. As NGOs, we
also were in a more difficult position during the informal sessions. NGOs were not allowed
to be present during informal session negotiations, and had to rely on contacts in the halls
to follow the process and to exert possible influence.
104
Not all NGOs were involved in lobbying; several chose just to observe the proceedings.
131
Lobbying in Vienna
An arena less conducive to melodrama than the ultra-formal context of a UN committee
meeting is hard to imagine. At the negotiations, the subject of trafficking could not have
been discussed in a more superficially rational, more dry, less apparently mythical way. The
use of competing ideologies by feminist lobbies is an example of this, but so is the
interactions between state delegations and between state delegations and lobbyists. The
fierce ideological battles waged around the definition of ‘trafficking’, when taken as the
subject of examination, reveal that trafficking operated as a myth, a performative period
piece with the power to shape international law and to transform reality.
When the Ad Hoc Committee meetings began, in 1998, they were not high on the
international political radar. Unlike other UN meetings, such as the UN Conference on
Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the UN Conference on Women
in Beijing in 1995 and the Population and Development Summit in Cairo 1996, there were
very few NGOs in attendance. At the first session, in January 1999, there were only the
handful of NGOs in our Human Rights Caucus, two delegates from the National Rifle
Association in America (there to lobby concerning the arms Protocol), and one from the
International Abolitionist Federation.
The small number of NGOs attending meetings made it easier than expected to approach
delegates. Ann Jordan, from the International Human Rights Law Group (IHRLG), our
most experienced delegate, had warned us that delegates might be reluctant to talk to
NGOs, as they had been in more high-profile UN meetings, where NGOs and states took
on nearly oppositional roles. We took this expected wariness into account in our role-play
training sessions, led by Ann, in various budget pensions in Vienna. Yet, we found,
contrary to expectations, that delegates were very approachable and even appreciative of
our lobby. We had produced masses of commentary which we revised and completed in
these same budget rooms, up late at night, sitting on our beds with fitful laptops and plenty
of strong coffee.
Despite these conditions, the documents we produced were extremely comprehensive. The
members of our group were experts in trafficking and/or international law, and as such
knew much more about the subject than most of the delegates. A few countries, such as
the US and Argentina, who had taken the initiative in developing the Trafficking Protocol,
132
had trafficking experts in the delegation. A few others had legal experts. The majority of
countries, however, especially developing countries, sent small delegations with only one or
two members, who often lacked expertise in law enforcement and trafficking.
Our extensive written commentary on each of the Protocol articles was updated for each
meeting. Most of the lobby encounters were quite quick, as delegates used the time
between the meetings to discuss within their own delegations and to meet informally with
other state delegations. Time for lobbyists was entirely at the will of the individual delegate,
and politeness and brevity were essential to keep them open to our approaches. Though I
had done international lobbying previously during the 1995 Women’s Conference in
Beijing, I had spoken only to a few delegates on my own. This time, I was responsible for
lobbying a sixth of the delegates, as we divided up all delegations during our pension
preparations. I approached my first delegate slightly nervously, with a stack of documents I
thought he would flee from. However, he was very friendly and though he had little time to
talk, took my entire pile saying he would read it later. When I approached him again the
next day, I found to my surprise that he had a number of questions for me based on our
documents. This was the common experience of our lobby throughout the negotiations:
the majority of delegates appreciated our efforts.
This did not necessarily mean that they agreed with us, but during the first year it seemed
that we were making reasonable progress towards our two primary goals: human rights
protections and de-linking of trafficking from prostitution. As the negotiations entered
their second year, however, and CATW became more active, the atmosphere changed. The
friendliness and openness that prevailed in the first year of the negotiations gave way to a
more frosty atmosphere, and it seemed as though that all our progress was being rolled
back, our achievements undone. We became increasingly gloomy – and I was an unhappy
Cassandra, taking no pleasure in my grim ‘I told you sos’.
Rights vs. crime
The most obvious way in which the Protocol bears the genealogical traces of white slavery
is in the text of the document itself. The language of the Protocol, in particular the
language concerned with elucidating the crime of trafficking, is in large part taken directly
from earlier international agreements on white slavery. Both nationally and internationally,
state response to white slavery was configured around the twin figures of the prostitute as
133
chaos bringer and as defiled innocent. Similarly, the Protocol, like previous international
legislation, encodes this duality, which is also the formative internal tension of the white
slavery myth. The chaos bringer and the innocent victim function as the magnetic poles of
the myth, the pull they exert on each other, not magnetism but consent. Without it, the
myth would lose its form, its structural integrity, and collapse flat.
This tension was reflected in the Protocol negotiations. As we experienced in the Human
Rights Caucus, this tension found expression in different opinions between states and
(certain) NGOs/INGOs around who needed protecting from what. Was it the state who
needed to protect itself against organised crime or the trafficked person who needed
protection from the state against organised crime? Or, as we argued, the draft Protocol was
concerned with ‘protecting the state instead of preventing and combating trafficking in
persons by protecting the human rights of the persons being trafficked’ (HRC,
Recommendations and Commentary, Jan. 1999: para. 2). In order to make this clearer for
delegates, we translated this distinction into the shorthand of a ‘human rights approach’
versus the ‘law enforcement approach’.
The failure to achieve strong human rights protections
One of our two main lobby goals was to shift the focus of the Protocol from the law
enforcement to a human rights approach (the other goal, to ensure a definition of
trafficking that was not linked to prostitution, is examined in the following chapter).
However, as state delegations were primarily concerned with organised crime, we needed to
find ways in which our arguments for human rights could ally these fears. We did this
through making the two positions complementary: stronger human rights protections, we
argued, would serve to make prosecutions of traffickers easier. Trafficked persons would
be more likely to come forward and to testify in court if they did not themselves fear
prosecution and deportation.
We failed in a large part to achieve the goal of strong human rights protections, as the final
Protocol contains much stronger law enforcement provisions than human rights
protections. Why was this so? Ann Jordan wrote a commentary on the Protocol after it was
completed. In her commentary, she explains that the Protocol is weak on human rights
protections because the Crimes Commission was a law enforcement rather than a human
134
rights body.105 According to Jordan, the Crimes Commission was given charge of the
instrument because:
the impetus for developing a new international instrument [on trafficking] arose
out of the desire of governments to create a tool to combat the enormous growth
of transnational organized crime. Therefore, the drafters created a strong law
enforcement tool with comparatively weak language on human rights protections
and victim assistance (2002: 2).
This is certainly a valid argument. However, there is a more profound, more subtle reason
that states were reluctant to opt for strong human rights protections for trafficked persons,
as advocated by the HRC. Recalling earlier international agreements, we remember that the
foreign prostitute was viewed as a moral threat when her migration was determined to be
voluntary – as an accomplice of, rather than victim to, the pimps and procurers.
Documents such as the US Immigration Report of 1909 – whose section on trafficking was
directly inspired by the 1904 Agreement on White Slavery – used graphic, heart rending
stories about young innocent victims and at the same time denounced the threat posed by
immigrant prostitutes and their procurers. As Haveman (1998) writes for the Netherlands,
Dutch negotiators on bilateral and international agreements on white slavery were
preoccupied with the question of how to stem the tide of immoral women. The situation
was similar in other European countries, as the white slave collided with the immoral
foreign prostitute.
Thus the weakness of protections and the strong law enforcement focus is not new in
international approaches to prostitution. It comes about because of the schism between the
prostitute/white slave/trafficked person as victim and as threat. As in white slavery
legislation, foreign prostitutes are seen as both victims and threats to the nation.106 Or, to
put it in terms of the title of the Protocol: who exactly is to be protected, who to be
punished, and what to be prevented?
105
Jordan notes that: ‘Priority areas within the mandate of the UN Crime Commission are: international
action to combat national and transnational crime, including organized crime, economic crime and money
laundering; promoting the role of criminal law in protecting the environment; crime prevention in urban
areas, including juvenile crime and violence; and improving the efficiency and fairness of criminal justice
administration systems’ (2002: 2 fn 5).
106 The US Immigration Commission of 1909 felt new measures were needed because the US could expect
help from Europe with ‘white slave trade’ but not with ‘voluntary travel of prostitutes to the United States’.
The 1909 Commission Report was, according to Connolly, ‘permeated with the contemporary belief in the
racial inferiority of the “new” immigration’ (Connelly 1980: 57). What is particularly interesting in this report
are the indications of the increase in numbers of women refused entry to the United States and/or deported
because they were suspected of being prostitutes.
135
The state and organised crime
The fear of organised crime on the part of the ‘international community’ formed the
background to the development of the Trafficking Protocol.107 The perceived transnational
nature of the ‘criminal networks’ demanded a ‘transnational’ response: for states to join
together to fight against what was seen as a cross-border problem. In the view of the HRC,
this led to a draft Protocol that was too heavily weighted toward combating organised
crime.108 The HRC argued that:
combating international trafficking in persons requires a two-fold approach: one, a
criminal response (prevent the crime and punish the trafficker) and, two, a human
rights response (protect the rights of trafficked persons). As written, the Preamble
[to the Protocol] places a disproportionate emphasis upon the criminal response.
Prevention, punishment and (human rights) protection must all be given equal
weight if the stated objective of halting criminal and human rights abuses of
trafficked persons is to be met (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary, Jan. 1999:
para. 1).
Protecting trafficked persons: ‘the human rights approach’
The HRC called our general philosophy about trafficking ‘the human rights approach’. The
term and the approach reflect the influence of the Dutch Foundation Against Trafficking
in Women (STV), a feminist anti-trafficking organisation begun in the 1980s in Utrecht.
This organisation was very influential in setting the agenda for anti-trafficking policy in the
Netherlands. It was also very active in helping to set up and advise anti-trafficking
organisations throughout the world, and was, with the Thai Foundation for Women, a key
force behind the establishment of GAATW. This liberal feminist approach to trafficking
was based on the distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution, a distinction
developed by feminists and sex worker rights organisations, as examined in Chapter One.
STV and the Dutch sex worker rights organisation, the Red Thread, had an ongoing and
generally positive relationship (though not without differences of opinion), which was
reflected in the ‘human rights approach’. The approach also bore the hallmarks of the
107
There is an entire mythos of its own around organised crime, from the Godfather and the Sopranos in the
US, to Japanese Yakuza in Manga comics. When this particularly potent body of myths intersects with the
sexually charged myths of white slavery/trafficking, the result is a heady brew indeed.
108 The US and Argentina submitted separate drafts for the January 1999 meeting, by the March 1999
meeting these had been combined into one.
136
Dutch approach to prostitution, which was similarly based on an adult woman’s right to
choose prostitution as work.109
The most comprehensive source for the ‘human rights approach’ are the ‘Human Rights
Standards for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons’, developed by GAATW (GAATW
1999) . The essential elements of this approach are:







giving the trafficking person the right to temporary residence in the country of
destination, regardless of that person’s status as a (potential) witness in a criminal
trial;
the provision of safe housing and educational opportunities during the temporary
residence;
the chance for residency to become permanent if there are strong chances of
reprisals by traffickers or by governments in countries of origin;
strong protection of trafficked persons during criminal trials against traffickers,
such as protection of identity;
no punishment for crimes committed while being trafficked (such as travelling
under false papers or working in prostitution);
not to be treated solely as a ‘victim’, but a recognition of the agency of trafficked
persons, and to base their treatment not on sympathy or pity but on internally
recognised human rights norms;
the distinction between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ prostitution.
The HRC and the INGOs who argued for a human rights approach to trafficking at the
negotiations did not dispute that trafficking was a matter of organised crime.110 As a
statement from the International Labor Organisation to the convention delegates stated:
‘In recent years, trafficking in persons, particularly in women and children, has considerably
increased and has become a major part of transnational activities and organized crime.
Coherent action at the international level is needed to respond to this development more
effectively’(ILO 1999). A similar position is reflected in submissions by the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), the United Nations Children’s Fund
109
Though this was not actually reflected in the law until 2000. The Dutch approach to prostitution was a
part of the well-known ‘tolerance’ approach of the Dutch to contentious social issues, such as prostitution
and drug use, which is sadly in decline. For an examination of the ‘tolerant’ Dutch approach to trafficking
with reference to the 2000 change in the law, see Visser (2003). For a comprehensive study of the Dutch
response to white slavery and trafficking, see Haveman (1998).
110 The case of INGO submissions is an interesting one. As NGOs such as GAATW have matured, they
have widened their sphere of influence: not only through successful lobbying, but also through having former
members (also more mature!) in new positions of (relative) power. Within the ‘human rights’ areas of the UN,
for example, the ‘GAATW approach’ has had more influence than the ‘CATW’ approach. Radika
Coomariswami, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, is very open about her move
from abolitionist to a GAATW position. The advisor on trafficking to the UNHCHR in Geneva has a
GAATW background.
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(UNICEF) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) (UNHCHR, UNICEF
and IOM 2000).
While the HRC philosophy distinguished between the law enforcement approach and the
human rights approach, it is not so that the human rights approach rejects the idea of
criminal prosecutions altogether. Rather, the two are seen as essential elements of policy
against trafficking. Successful prosecutions of traffickers, according to this philosophy, are
only possible if the human rights of trafficked persons are respected. In a letter to
conference delegates, the HRC expressed this as: ‘Governments need to make a
commitment to protect the rights of trafficked persons, particularly if they want victims
and their advocates to cooperate with them in prosecutions’ (HRC, Letter to delegates, Oct.
2000). Our position was supported by the UNHCHR, UNICEF and the IOM, who argued
that protections for trafficked persons in the Protocol were ‘unnecessarily restrictive and
not in accordance with international human rights laws’ (UNHCHR, UNICEF and IOM
2000).
The two sides of the Protocol
The original drafts of the Protocol, submitted by the US and Argentina, refer to trafficking
in women and children and explicitly linked trafficking to prostitution. Before examining
the location of the ‘victim’ and the ‘threat’ in the language of the Protocol, it is essential to
realise that the subject being constructed as a victim or as a threat was both female and a
prostitute. The subject remained such throughout the negotiations, despite the best efforts
of the HRC and several state delegations to craft a ‘neutral’ Protocol: one that didn’t
mention gender of the subject, nor the purpose for which they were trafficked (this is
examined in Chapter Seven).
The Trafficking Protocol lists, as one of its primary purposes, the need to protect the
trafficked person. The title of the Protocol includes protection as one of three key terms:
‘protect, prevent, and punish’. Provisions concerning protections of trafficking victims are
detailed in articles 6, 7 and 8. These protections are comprehensive in scope: indeed, most
of the protections advocated for by the HRC, the UNHCHR, ILO, IOM and UNICEF are
covered. The main article covering human rights protections is article 6, which contains
provisions regarding the protection of the privacy of victims; housing, counseling, and
medical and material assistance; employment, and compensation. The article also calls upon
states to take the age and gender of victims into account, with particular regard for the
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‘special needs’ of children. Article 7 concerns the victim’s right to remain in the destination
country, and article 8 deals with victim’s rights in instances of repatriation.
However, while the list of protections is comprehensive, it is also discretionary. Phrases
such as ‘in appropriate cases and to the extent possible, state parties shall’ (article 6:1);
‘Each state party shall consider implementing measures’ (article 6: 2); and ‘each party shall
consider adopting’ (8:1) leave enactment of these provisions entirely at the discretion of the
state. In contrast, the provisions dealing with co-operation between law enforcement and
immigration officials (article 10), border control (article 11), and the production and
control of passports (articles 12 and 13) contain mandatory language such as, ‘Each State
Party shall adopt’ (article 11: 2) and ‘Each State Party shall take the necessary measures’.111
Treating victims like criminals – protecting the state from the prostitute
When lobbying delegates, we found that many felt that a too-heavy emphasis on human
rights protections in the Protocol would detract from its efficacy as a law-enforcement
document. That states refused to back strong protections reveals the extent to which they
viewed prostitutes not just as women and children vulnerable to organised crime, but as
themselves threats to the state, accomplices in the webs of organised crime threatening
state order. In order to understand this reaction, we can look in more detail at what
happened in the negotiations; in particular, how states responded to the HRC demand for
strong protections.
The HRC argued that state delegations were confusing trafficking with smuggling. As
mentioned previously, negotiations concerning a separate, additional Protocol on
smuggling of migrants were also being conducted within the Crimes Commission. This
Protocol was concerned with illegal border crossing facilitated by 'organised crime'. When
possible, members of the HRC also attended discussions of the Smuggling Protocol. We
found that many delegates were using the word ‘trafficking’ when discussing the Smuggling
Protocol. When we spoke to delegates, we found that many of them were confused about
the difference between 'trafficking' and 'smuggling'. It was very important for the aims of
the HRC that this difference was clearly understood, as the core of the Human Rights
Approach is that trafficked persons were not criminally responsible for their situation.
111
See also Jordan 2002.
139
To delegates, we pointed out that the Trafficking Protocol was in danger of treating the
trafficked person (implicitly a prostitute) as an undocumented migrant, rather than the
victim of human rights violations. We argued that the articles concerning border controls
appeared to deal with the prevention of undocumented migration and thus belonged in the
Smuggling Protocol. The crime of trafficking, we pointed out, necessarily involved
deception, coercion or debt bondage. Furthermore, we argued that although the Protocol
recognised that trafficked persons were victims of crimes, it did nothing to assure that law
enforcement officials would treat them as victims rather than criminals. A particularly
telling example of the ‘fear of the victim’ was the use of the term ‘rehabilitation’ in an early
draft of Protocol, to describe how states should treat ‘trafficking victims’.112 The High
Commissioner for Human Rights captures the duality perfectly in her submission to the
Crimes Commission: ‘the High Commissioner notes that the term “rehabilitation” as used
in international legal texts is generally reserved for offenders. The terms…victim
“restitution”, “compensation” and “assistance” would be much more appropriate in this
context’ (UNHCHR 1999 para. 4).
The degree to which the differences between trafficking and smuggling was understood
varied between delegates. Just when it seemed like everyone had agreed to use 'smuggling'
during discussions of the Smuggling Protocol and had found a way to express the concept
in French and Spanish as well as English, suddenly delegates started using the phrase 'illegal
trafficking' again. While the two Protocols use different terminology, confusion regarding
criminal culpability persists. In an introduction to its work, the International Centre for
Crime Prevention – under whose aegis the Protocol was conducted – continues to shows a
confusion between the terms:
Globalization has provided the environment for a growing internationalization of
criminal activities. Multinational criminal syndicates have significantly broadened
the range of their operations from drug and arms trafficking to money laundering.
Traffickers move as many as 4 million illegal migrants each year generating gross
earnings of between 5 and 7 billion US dollars (www.uncjin.org).
The confusion between trafficking and smuggling is more than linguistic. It indicates the
importance of the ideas of who deserves protection and who deserves punishment. The
112
The term ‘rehabilitation’ is very commonly used when referring to prostitutes, and commonly refers to a
situation of forcible detainment in state ‘rehabilitation centres’ or on NGO premises (Human Rights Watch
1998, Empower 2003). At the 3rd annual National Sex Workers Network meeting in Trivandrum, Kerala,
India (March 3-8, 2003) which I attended, an entire session was devoted discussing the repressive effects of
these ‘rehabilitation’ policies.
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states who were most open to strong protections for trafficked persons included those who
were most vociferous in arguing that the Protocol should treat all prostitution as violence
against women; or, as we stated it, those who fought to turn the Protocol from ‘an antitrafficking into an anti-prostitution document’ (HRC, Delete the term ‘sexual exploitation, June
1999). This apparently contradictory position is explainable if we recall that a key tactic in
deciding just who should be treated as a white slave was by establishing the innocence of
the victim. This put us as HRC lobbyists on a similarly contradictory footing with these
state delegations. Belgium and France were two of the states who were strongest in support
of human rights protection, but who were most implacable in demanding that the Protocol
strongly condemn all prostitution as ‘sexual exploitation’.
States domestic policies on trafficking reveal the practical impact of the rather innocuous
sounding phrases in Articles 11, 12 and 13; giving them a familiar, worrying ring to the
HRC activists. The provision in article 11 on border controls is particularly ominous:
‘States Parties shall strengthen, to the extent possible, such border controls as may be
necessary to prevent and detect trafficking in persons’ (article 11: 1). The UK, for example,
was against strong protections for trafficking victims. As we argued in our
recommendations, the United Kingdom reported it had a border control policy of
identifying certain migrant women as 'possible prostitutes' and a deportation policy
targeting sex workers for the purpose of preventing trafficking in women (HRC,
Recommendations and Commentary, Dec. 1999).
During the white slavery era, restricting immigration was seen as a solution to the problem.
Today’s policies differ little in form or intent. The potential for discrimination in antitrafficking policies was recognised by the High Commissioner for Human Rights in her
note to the Crimes Commission: ‘The High Commissioner draws attention to the fact that
national anti-trafficking measures have been used in some situations to discriminate against
women and other groups in a manner that amounts to a denial of their basic right to leave
a country and to migrate legally’ (UNHCHR 1999 para. 25). As with white slavery, antitrafficking measures to protect ‘innocent’ women are being used to counter the supposed
threat to society posed by ‘bad’ women. Repressive immigration measures enacted to stop
‘trafficking’ include limiting the number of visas issued to women from ‘origin’ countries,
increased policing of borders and high penalties for illegal migrants and those who facilitate
their entry or stay (Wijers 1998; Pearson 2002).
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The west vs. the rest?
CATW claims that western countries, along with the HRC, were pitted against developing
countries on the side of CATW (Raymond 1999). It was not, however, as straightforward
as that. In terms of the protection provisions, the HRC found strong allies in both
‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries, including Italy and Thailand. However, in general,
the richest countries were most resistant to HRC lobbying for obligatory language
concerning aid, assistance and protection in the form of residence permits to trafficked
persons. They were resistant for two reasons – firstly, because of the perceived cost of
providing aid but more importantly, the fear of encouraging (illegal) migration to their
countries. This was most apparent in rich states’ reactions around the issue of residence
permits, or victims’ right to remain in the country to which they were trafficked (article 8).
My conversations with a delegate from a European country provide an example of how the
fear of illegal migration and the reluctance to promote strong rights protections were
linked. They also show the less-than-ideal nature of some of our own lobbying strategies, as
well as the connections between consent and protection that will be elaborated on in the
next chapter. At the point in the negotiations that this conversation occurred (June 1999),
the draft definition of trafficking linked prostitution to trafficking. We were trying to
convince delegates that a definition of trafficking that included voluntary prostitution
would mean that they would have to spend precious resources on, and give at least
temporary residence to, all migrant prostitutes in the country. The delegate was very
receptive to this argument.
Here we can see the unsavoury nature of the lobby trade-off. For rich countries, the desire
to limit the definition of trafficking to situations of force came, not because their own legal
systems treated prostitution as work (except in the cases of the Netherlands, Germany and
Australia), but because of the fear of making things ‘too attractive’ for migrants. We
continued to exploit this fear throughout the negotiations. For example, our letter to
delegates during the last, most acrimonious round of discussions stated:
Scarce resources will be diverted from real trafficking cases in order to 'rescue' and
enforce 'rehabilitation' of non-coerced migrant sex workers who do not want to be
'rescued' or 'rehabilitated. States will have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to
‘help’ voluntary migrant sex workers who do not ask for nor want help or
assistance. This will divert funds away from trafficking victims. Voluntary, noncoerced migrant sex workers would be redefined as ‘victims’ who may be eligible
receive benefits, such as, appropriate housing information about legal rights,
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medical, psychological, economic assistance, employment, education, and training
opportunities (HRC, Letter to Delegates, Oct. 2000).
A number of developing countries were also reluctant to back mandatory provisions for
assistance to trafficked persons. Many developing countries are considered both ‘countries
of origin’ and ‘countries of destination’ when it comes to trafficking. While countries such
as Brazil were, in principle, in favour of strong protections for trafficking victims, they
were worried about the cost of providing adequate protection for their own returning
nationals, as well as for protections for persons trafficked to their countries. An African
delegate told me he was worried about the inappropriate use of funds because of people
lying about being trafficking victims. We were aware of this and took it into account when
lobbying these countries:
The other important issue we should all be keeping in focus is the fact that many
countries will try to water down protections and give themselves discretion on
whether or not to provide protections. We need to keep arguing for the use of
mandatory language, with the phrase 'within available means' or 'to the extent
possible' inserted in sections where there is a monetary cost to providing the
protections (HRC email-list, 23-05-2000).
Moral Panics and Boundary Crisis
A more detailed examination of the negotiating positions of two countries with whom the
HRC had extensive contact, one ‘developing’ and one ‘developed’, is also helpful in
examining how perceptions of the trafficking victim as an undocumented migrant
prostitute influenced the negotiations. These are the Philippines and the United States.
When the negotiations started, a person who had worked very closely with members of the
HRC was appointed as a junior member of the Philippines delegation. Though junior, her
arguments held a lot of sway within the delegation, as the more senior members were not
experts in the field. Accordingly, the Philippines in the first year of negotiations
consistently supported strong human rights protections, and seemed willing to go along
with a definition of trafficking that did not include prostitution as ‘sexual exploitation’.
This all changed when CATW stepped up their lobby efforts near the end of the first year
of negotiations (December 1999). CATW has a very strong presence in the Philippines, and
one of its leading members was appointed to the delegation, outranking ‘our’ contact. She
swiftly set about reversing the Philippines position. Where they were previously strong on
human rights protections, in the second year of negotiations they said little. The main
concern of the Philippines delegation had become the reputation of the Philippines. This
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was caused by a rumour spread in the Philippines legislature and media that ‘our’ delegate
had said that the Philippines wanted legalised prostitution. ‘Our’ delegate was denounced in
the Philippine Parliament and thrown off the delegation. The Philippines, and other
countries that perceived to have large numbers of women ‘trafficked’ from them, are
intensely worried about their reputations as the suppliers of the brothels of the world
(Tyner 1996).113 Internally, they have responded by making emigration and even travel for
their female citizens more difficult.
Sexual danger
Restriction of mobility for women also occurred during the white slavery era. As shown in
Chapters Three and Four, while the discourse on white slavery ostensibly was about the
protection of women from (male) violence, to a large extent, the welfare of the ‘white
slaves’ was actually peripheral to the discourse. A supposed threat to women’s safety served
as a marker of and metaphor for other fears, among them fear of women’s growing
independence, the breakdown of the family, and loss of national identity through the influx
of immigrants.
Grittner, in his analysis of the American myth of white slavery, describes it in terms of a
‘moral panic’ as defined by Stan Cohen:
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A
condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a
threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and
stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by
editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or
(more often) reverted to....sometimes the panic is passed over and is forgotten,
except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and
long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and
social policy or even in the way society conceives itself (Cohen cited in Grittner
1990: 64).
During the white slavery era, the moral panic was in part provoked by the desire of women
for increased independence. As shown in Chapters Three and Four, accounts of white
slavery served as ‘cautionary tales’ for women and girls (Guy 1991: 6), with a message of
sexual peril as inevitable fate of women who leave the protection of the family. As Guy
observes: ‘Fears of white slavery in Buenos Aires were directly linked to European
113
Thailand has responded by aggressively promoting their mandatory condom use policy for brothels, in
which in an echo of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the police ensure that brothel workers are taken for STD
examinations. See Overs and Longo 2003.
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disapproval of female migration. Racism, nationalism, and religious bigotry fuelled
anxieties. Men could safely travel abroad, but unescorted women faced sexual danger’
(1991: 7). This disapproval was linked to insecurities about urbanisation and the appeal of
city life to single women seeking independence, and the perceived disintegration of family
life, exacerbated by rapid processes of industrialisation (Bristow 1982; Grittner 1990).
During the white slavery panic, leaflets and posters at railway stations were produced to
warn girls off venturing abroad or to the city (Coote 1910). Today’s efforts are similar.
Protocol article 9, concerning the prevention of trafficking, requires states undertake
campaigns to warn potential victims of the dangers of trafficking. As the example of the
IOM poster in Chapter Four shows, these campaigns focus on warning women of the
sexual dangers of life away from home and hearth. Videos and pamphlets directed at
‘vulnerable’ young women portray in graphic detail the likely fate of those who dare to
migrate
The perceptions of sexual danger both to, and of, female migrants permeated the
negotiations. The Protocol was not only gendered, but also sexualised. This becomes
especially evident when contrasted with the Smuggling Protocol. Both Protocols were
intended to address the movement of people across borders by international organised
crime networks. However, the migrants addressed in the Smuggling Protocol are seen as
complicit in the criminal activities covered by the Protocol. The subject of the Smuggling
Protocol is an undocumented migrant, knowingly engaging the services of smugglers to
illegally cross borders. The language of this Protocol is gender-neutral, but this very
neutrality indicates that the subject of the Protocol is implicitly male (See also Ditmore
2002). By contrast, the Protocol language is gendered, as reflected in the title ‘especially
women and children’. The subject of the Trafficking Protocol is female.114 During
negotiations around the Trafficking Protocol, delegates continually spoke of ‘women and
children’ being trafficked. On the surface, the genderisation of the Protocols seems to
reflect a simple binary in ideas of agency: trafficked women are assumed to be duped
victims, while smuggled men are assumed to be knowing agents in their own movement.
The gender division of the two Protocols can then be seen as ‘smuggled men’ and
‘trafficked women’. However, this reading fails to account for the ways in which both men
and women can be seen as victims of, or as complicit in, crime. On the one hand, it is true
114
Or a child, the linking of women and children is examined below in this chapter.
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that men are more likely to be narratively inscribed as resourceful and brave for migrating.
However, men are also written as ‘victims’ – though markedly less often. As both Stenvoll
(2002) and Chapkis (2003) note, it is not only within discourses of trafficking for
prostitution that divisions are made between ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’. The divisions are made
in debates around migrant smuggling, with ‘genuine asylum seekers’ pitted against ‘bogus
asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’.
On the other hand, it is by no means all migrant women who are imagined to possess the
characteristics of the victim. As shown in Chapter Three, the myth of white slavery was
never ‘closed’, as I observed, if innocence was a constantly reoccurring theme in narratives
about white slavery, this was complicated by the continued presence (or the marked
absence) of the image of the prostitute as chaos-bringer. The female subject of the
Trafficking Protocol was not simply considered as only passive or victimised. Here we can
see the re-manifestation of the ghost of the white slave, in all her ambiguity. As Chapter
Three demonstrated, debates around white slavery were preoccupied with determining who
was to be considered a ‘real’ victim: women who consented to prostitution were certainly
deemed capable of agency (as we now understand the term), and condemned for it.
Similarly, the inclination to include controlling and possibly repressive measures, such as
those examined above, in a document ostensibly crafted to protect an innocent, nonculpable victim, reveals an awareness of the possibility of female (criminal) agency. The
HRC, backed by INGOs, lobbied that these provisions were misplaced: that any illegal but
voluntary migration or border crossing must be considered smuggling and thus dealt with
in the appropriate convention. Yet delegates, while on the one hand fully replicating the
white slavery victim image in their interventions, one the other remained motivated by her
shadow, the whore. Weighted down with the baggage of myth, the sexualised, female
subject of the trafficking protocol could not cross over (migrate?) into the ‘neutral’ space of
the Smuggling Protocol.
Female honour, state dishonour
If the ‘innocent victim’ is one of the defining elements of the trafficking myth, what of the
women who are not so easily defined as ‘innocent’? Next to the young virgin is her
counterpart and mirror image, the hardened prostitute. This, too, is familiar from white
slavery stories. As I examined in Chapter Two, the narratives of white slavery were built in
opposition to each other, familiar narratives of prostitution: the prostitute as the bringer of
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social chaos, the destroyer of order. The perceived sexual threat to women migrating is
linked to women’s role as bearers of their families’, and the nation’s, honour. Grittner
analyses the ‘moral panic’ around white slavery in terms of Kai Ericson’s notion of a
‘boundary crisis’: in times of cultural stress, a community ‘draws a symbolic set of
parenthesis’ around certain human behaviour, limiting the range of acceptable action’
(Ericson cited in Grittner 1990: 7). According to Grittner, white slavery was part of a larger
boundary crisis in America involving ‘women, sexuality, and the family’ (1990: 8).
The notion of a boundary crisis is particularly pertinent when looking at women and
migration. Drawing from her earlier work, Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) analyses the
intersections between discourses of nation and gender at four levels: women as biological
reproducers of the nation; women’s role in cultural construction of nations; gender
relations; citizenship and difference; and the gendered character of the military and of wars.
It is at the second level, that of women’s role in the cultural construction of nations, that a
link can be made between Grittner’s (1990) use of the concept of a boundary crisis and
constructions of gender/state relations in discourses of white slavery and trafficking in
women. According to Yuval-Davis:
Women especially are often required to carry this ‘burden of representation’, as
they are constructed as the symbolic bearers of collectivities’ identity and honour,
both personally and collectively....Women, in their ‘proper’ behaviour, their
‘proper’ clothing, embody the line which signifies the collectivities’ boundaries
(1997: 45-46).
Donna Guy (1991) drawing on the earlier configuration of gender/state relations in
Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989), signals this link as well:
The central issue that united anti-white slavery campaigns in Europe and
Argentina was the way unacceptable female sexual conduct defined the behaviour
of the family, the good citizen, and ultimately national or religious honor… Rather
than reflecting a completely verifiable reality, white slavery was the construction of
a set of discourses about family reform, the role of women’s work in modernizing
societies, and the gendered construction of politics (1991: 35).
CATW targets Clinton
What was the situation with the United States? The US was one of the main instigators of
the Protocol, submitting the first draft (concurrently with Argentina, who submitted a
separate draft) to the Crimes Commission. This draft referred to ‘trafficking in women and
children’ and also listed prostitution as a type of ‘sexual exploitation’. Despite this, the US
was very receptive to the arguments made by the Human Rights Caucus, both in terms of
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human rights protections, and for the need for the Protocol to focus on trafficking for all
types of labour. Again, as with the Philippines, this changed in the second year. The
temperature rose in December 1999, when CATW mounted an aggressive campaign in the
United States, accusing the Clinton administration of supporting ‘legalised prostitution’ at
the UN. According to Concerned Women for America (a conservative women’s
organisation, that supported CATW’s lobby efforts):
Even more discouraging (after the idea of giving out free condoms in Africa since
abstinence is the answer to Africans Aids crisis, not condoms) is a new push
coming from the White House. The president's Interagency Council on Women,
co-chaired by Hillary Clinton, is calling for the adoption of a definition that would
make "voluntary" prostitution a legitimate form of labor. They base this call on the
"need" for women to have control over their own bodies. This immoral policy
would not help women. It would only increase the spread of HIV/AIDS, among
other problems. Prostitution is degrading (CWA 2000).
This is also the point where the American abstinence approach to Aids-related foreign
policy and trafficking meet, examined below.
In coalition with conservative religious groups, CATW was able to put severe pressure on
the US delegation. They enlisted the notorious conservative Senator Jesse Helms in the
campaign to discredit the US negotiators and to force them to take an anti-prostitution
position at the negotiations.115 The Clinton Administration, in particular the President’s
Interagency Council on Women, took the attack seriously. They responded by issuing a
document kit to relevant parties, including the media, NGOs and legislators, clarifying the
US position in Vienna.116 The kit contained a document entitled (interestingly for this
thesis) UN Trafficking Treaty: Myths/Facts, which opened by reaffirming the US antiprostitution position:
MYTH: The Protocol will legalize prostitution.
FACT: The Administration opposes prostitution in all its forms. The United
States has perhaps the most far-reaching prostitution laws in the world. There are
international human rights and humanitarian laws that fight exploitation and
prostitution. We will not agree to a treaty that weakens existing prostitution laws
here or around the world (President’s Interagency Council on Women 2000).
The prostitution laws in the United States are overwhelmingly prohibitionist – that is, they
target the prostitute as well as, or instead of, supposed ‘pimps’ and ‘procurers’. Many of
these laws are a direct legacy of the white slavery campaigns. The anti-prostitution position,
115
For an account of how the feminist/conservative coalition influenced US domestic trafficking legislation,
see Chapkis 2003 and Crago 2003.
116 At one point (January 2000), a rumour went round that the US delegations was ‘not allowed’ to talk to
members of the Human Rights Caucus.
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which was less prevalent in the US delegation when it began negotiating, gradually became
more influential.117 In December 1999, the US delegation introduced a recommendation on
preventing prostitution and the need to address the ‘demand’ for prostitutes. But, the real
significance of the US position, and the feminist campaign to influence it, would not be felt
at the negotiations themselves. Its true impact was as the focal point around which
coalitions formed that would influence policy making under the Bush administration.
These policies cut foreign aid to countries that appeared to ‘support’ prostitution and
refuse HIV/AIDS funding to NGOs and governments that do not take an explicitly antiprostitution position (examined below).
Abolitionist feminism and the boon of terrorism
Abolitionist feminist had limited success in their attempts to influence the US position at
the delegations (examined in the following chapter) and, relatedly, the US Trafficking Bill
under the Clinton administration. However, their influence on US policy has grown under
the Bush administration as they have allied themselves with conservative religious groups;
alliances formed during the Protocol negotiations. Donna Hughes, former director of
CATW, uses her regular contributions to the far-right National Review to denounce sex
worker organisations and activists, including the NSWP. The abolitionist feminist campaign
against trafficking has been given a boost by the ‘war on terror’. Hughes’ comments on
Bush’s Iraq speech to the UN (September 24th , 2003) shows support for the linking of
trafficking to terrorism:
At the United Nations, before key world leaders and an international body that
symbolizes human rights, President Bush put the fight against the global sex trade
on par with the campaign for democracy in Iraq and the war on terrorism. And as
he has done with terrorism, he challenged governments around the world on their
complacency: If they tolerate the sex trade, they "are tolerating a form of slavery."
This is the kind of clarity of thinking and leadership the movement against
trafficking and sexual exploitation has been waiting for… All the activists I've
heard from were thrilled and inspired by President Bush's speech…. The
president's stated commitment to opposing the global sex trade places the U.S. on
the forefront of a new movement for human freedom, rights, and dignity. It was
117The
US delegation was not pleased with the pressure put on them to denounce prostitution, as they were
worried – correctly as it turned out – that a strong anti-prostitution position would make them appear to be
blocking consensus on the Protocol. At the final session, the US took the position of agreeing with all
majority positions ‘in the name of consensus’. The Philippines did actually block consensus up to the last
session, with their insistence that all prostitution be listed as sexual exploitation in the definition of
trafficking. Other state delegations and the session Chair became extremely frustrated by the Philippine’s
intransigence. This eventually resulted in a complaint to the head of the Philippines delegation, concerning
the behaviour of the CATW member of that delegation, by the influential Chair of the informal working
group on the definition of trafficking.
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fitting that he made this statement alongside a call for democracy building in Iraq
and opposition to terrorism (Hughes 2003b).
In a series of ‘nimble juxtapositions’ (Haag 1999), organised crime is equated to terrorism;
is equated to trafficking. This is a particularly good example of what Laclau (1998) calls
‘chains of equivalences’, a key part of how ideology works. As summarised by Zizek (1994)
this is, ‘that meaning does not inhere in elements of an ideology as such – these elements,
rather, function as ‘free-floating signifiers’ whose meaning is fixed by the mode of their
hegemonic articulation (p. 12). In ‘chains of equivalence’ concepts become
interchangeable, so when one term is mentioned, the entire sequence is evoked. Laclau uses
the example of ‘democracy’ to explain how chains of equivalence give meanings to terms: ‘a
signifier like ‘democracy’ is essentially ambiguous by dint of its widespread political
circulation: it acquires one possible meaning when articulated with ‘anti-fascism’ and a
completely different one when articulated with ‘anti-communism’’ (1990: 28).
The link to terrorism, particularly since 9-11, makes anti-trafficking an essential element of
anti-terrorism. The links to terrorism make the problem seem even more terrifying and the
need for immediate action all the more serious. It makes state intervention seem necessary
and right, and justifies curtailment of civil liberties in the name of protection. In this sense,
the justifications mesh so well with abolitionist desire to discipline through protection
legislation, which is exactly what the following quote from the Jerusalem Post illustrates:
Try telling any man who goes to prostitutes for sexual gratification that in so doing
he contributes to global terror, organized crime, slavery, and drug trafficking, and
the reaction will be one of incredulity. But according to participants in a
Mishkenot Sha'ananim sponsored conference on Slavery 2003: Trafficking in
Women, the links between trafficking in women, terror, and organized crime are a
grim reality (07-17-2003).
Suffering bodies, protection and ressentiment
In contrast to the HRC, the CATW caucus put very little effort into lobbying states to
support strong human rights protections. This is not as illogical as it first seems. As
explained in Chapter Two, abolitionism is, in Corbin’s (1990) terms ‘discreetly
prohibitionist’. Historically and today, abolitionists promote the ‘law enforcement’
approach and call for ‘state protection’ through police involvement. This is a great irony, as
Josephine Butler started her abolitionist campaign as a reaction against the police treatment
of prostitutes.
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There is a second, related reason that abolitionist feminist are willing to support what
appear to be conservative, anti-feminist policies against prostitution. While on the one
hand motivated by a desire to help victims, they also actually perceive the sex worker as a
threat. The effect of their ideology is to neutralise the sex worker by making her disappear.
In the abolitionist analysis, there are no sex workers, not even any prostitutes, only
‘prostituted women’. So men and boys also disappear. One way of ‘neutralising’ sex
workers is by neutering them – by turning them into presumed sexless children. CATW
thus lobbied for the retention of the phrase ‘women and children’ throughout the Protocol.
This collapse of women and children into one group effectively reduces women to the
status of children. Objection to this collapse formed a central element of the Human
Rights Caucus position in Vienna. Our recommendation paper argued:
Obviously, by definition, no one consents to abduction or forced labour, but an
adult woman is able to consent to engage in an illicit activity (such as prostitution,
where this is illegal or illegal for migrants). If no one is forcing her to engage in
such an activity, then trafficking does not exist…Additionally, the historical
linkage of 'women and children' has proven problematic in multiple ways. The
linkage often encompasses the treatment of women as if they are children and
denies women the rights attached to adulthood, such as the right to have control
over one's own life and body. The linkage also serves to emphasize a single role
for women as caretakers for children and to deny the changing nature of women's
role in society, most notably, women's increasing role as the sole supporter of
dependent family members and, consequently, as economic migrants in search of
work. Nearly half of the migrants today are women’ (HRC, Recommendations and
Commentary, June 1999: para. 16).
We also argued that the phrase ‘women and children’ failed to account for types of
trafficking involving men, stressing that men as well as women could be ‘trafficked’. (As
part of our own sleight-of-hand, making ‘the prostitute’ disappear, dealt with in the
following chapter).
Who’s hurting now?
The ‘injured body’ of the ‘trafficking victim’ as used by CATW feminists in their campaign
against trafficking, and that informed their lobby position in Vienna, serves as a powerful
metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of
sex workers themselves. The term ‘injured body’ is drawn from Wendy Brown’s States of
Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). In this work, Brown argues that modern
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identity politics are based on a feeling of ‘injury’ caused by exclusion from the presumed
‘goods’ of the modern liberal state.
Brown suggests that politicised identity’s potential for transforming structures of
domination is severely limited because of its own investment in a history of ‘pain’. The
‘pain’ or ‘injury’ at the heart of politicised identity is social subordination and exclusion
from universal equality and justice promised by the liberal state. This historical pain
becomes the foundation for identity, as well as, paradoxically, that which identity politics
strives to bring to an end. In other words, identity based on injury cannot let go of that
injury without ceasing to exist. This paradox results in a politics that seeks protection from
the state, rather than power and freedom for itself. In seeking protection from the same
structures that cause injury, this politics risks reaffirming, rather than subverting, structures
of domination, and risks reinscribing injured identity in law and policy through its demands
for state protection against injury.
According to Brown, politicised identity, including feminism, displays many of the
‘attributes of…. ressentiment’ (1995: 27): the tendency on the part of the powerless to
reproach power with moral arguments rather than to seek out power for itself. The term
ressentiment is from Nietzsche, developed in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887 [1969]). The turn
to Nietzsche accounts for Brown’s use of terms like ‘pain’ and ‘injury’ to indicate the
effects of marginalisation and subordination. Nietzsche postulates that the cause of
ressentiment is ‘suffering’: this suffering causes the individual to look for a site of blame for
the hurt, as well as to revenge itself upon the ‘hurter’. Brown describes the ‘politics of
ressentiment’ as follows:
Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it
[the politics of ressentiment] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by
constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social
subordination. It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social
positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities
of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning...the
effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as
appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such
protection by such protectors (1995: 27).
Injured identities and disappearing sex workers
The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how and
why, and where, CATW feminists positioned the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse at
the negotiations. Brown’s (1995) examination of the historical formation of late modern
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politicised identities places the problematic of ‘logics of pain in the subject formation
processes’ (p. 55) in a central position. This has immediate resonance: CATW’s campaign
against trafficking in women constantly reiterates the literal, physical pain undergone by
‘third world prostitute’ bodies. If ‘politicized identity’s investment…in its own history of
suffering’ (Brown 1995: 55) is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this
may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of third world
trafficking victims in their discourses of women’s subjugation.
Brown examines the genealogy of late-modern political identity formation in North
America in terms of the ways in which identities such as those of gender, race, or
homosexuality are constructed on the basis of perceived historical ‘injuries’. CATW’s
position on of the role of prostitution in women’s oppression proceeds along the same
‘injury/identity’ nexus analysed by Brown. In CATW's analysis, women’s subordination is
the result of sex. Sex is defined as ‘the condition of subordination of women that is both
bodied in femaleness and enacted in sexual experience’ (Barry 1995: 278). For CATW
feminists, sex is power: male power over women.
Though CATW’s aim is to protect and fight for ‘prostituted women’, the presence, the
existence, of actual sex workers presents difficulties for them. On the one hand,
‘prostituted women’ who agree with the feminist abolitionist analysis of their situation are
accepted and supported. For example, the group WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of
Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), composed of former prostitutes who campaign for the
eradication of prostitution, has a good working relationship with CATW. On the other,
there are the vocal and often politically active sex workers around the world who campaign
for acceptance of sex work as legitimate work. These present a conundrum for CATW.118
Convinced that no-one could ever choose to work in prostitution, self-identified ‘sex
workers’ bewilder abolitionist feminists. The inability to comprehend a self-chosen sex
worker identity means CATW feminist perceive sex worker rights advocates as being in
league with ‘pimps’ and ‘traffickers’. At the negotiations a rumour was spread that the
Human Rights Caucus was a front for ‘the international prostitution mafia’.119 In a
118
There are many more sex worker organisations that support the view of sex work labour than those who
support the feminist abolitionist position. Globally, WHISPER is the only organisation that identifies with
this perspective. See Chapkis 1997 for a discussion of WHISPER. Books by Nagle 1997 and Kempadoo and
Doezema 1998, as well articles on the NSWP website (www.nswp.org), demonstrate the strength of the sex
worker rights position among sex workers world wide.
119 See also the account by fellow NSWP member Melissa Ditmore (2002).
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statement quoted in a newspaper article about the Protocol, CATW co-director Dorchen
Leidholdt called the International Human Rights Law Group (one of the organisations that
spearheaded the HRC) ‘and other organizations that advocate for legalized prostitution
‘protection rackets for the sex industry’’ (Soriano 2000). As NSWP member and fellow
lobbyist Melissa Ditmore recounts, GAATW member Marjan Wijers, Melissa herself, and I
were referred to as ‘pro-prostitution’ advocates in a CATW newsletter. Ditmore responded
to this by writing: ‘This language is akin to the use of the “pro-abortion” rather than “prochoice” by activists who seek to ban abortion’ (Ditmore 2002: 58)
Power and prostitution
In claiming the ‘injured prostitute’ as the ontological and epistemological basis of feminist
truth, abolitionist feminists forecloses the possibility of political confrontation with sex
workers who claim a different experience. It is this move – the insistence that there is one
‘truth’ about sex workers experience, and that this truth must be the basis of feminist
political action – that reveals abolitionist ideology’s investment in ressentiment. This
moralism serves to obscure the operations of power in CATW’s constructions of prostitute
experience.
In abolitionist ideology, the subject of the prostitute is constructed partially through the
lens of orientalism. Liddle and Rai argue that orientalist power is exercised when ‘the
author denies the subject the opportunity for self-representation’ (1998: 512) . While pitied
for having to 'actively incorporate dehumanization into [their] identity' (Barry 1995: 70),
first world sex worker activists are at the same time held responsible for women's
oppression: 'to "embrace" prostitution sex as one's self-chosen identity is to be actively
engaged in promoting women's oppression in behalf of oneself' (Barry 1995: 71). Third
world sex workers, however, are not even credited with knowing what sex worker rights are
all about. Referring to third world sex workers, CATW founder Kathleen Barry writes: ‘
‘Sex work’ language has been adopted out of despair, not because these women promote
prostitution but because it seems impossible to conceive of any other way to treat
prostitute women with dignity and respect than through normalizing their exploitation’
(1995: 296).
However, it is not only western feminists who treat third world sex workers as child-like
and unable to speak for themselves. Third world anti-trafficking activists can also take a
‘matronising’ stance towards sex workers. This was illustrated at the October 2000
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meetings, when a spoken intervention by a member of the Philippines delegation who was
also a director of CATW ‘seemed intended to define prostitutes as children’ (Ditmore
2002: 9). The ‘suffering body’ is not a one dimensional image whose sole function is to
reassure western feminists of their moral rightness and superiority. She figures in nonwestern feminist (and other) discourses as a metaphor for a number of fears, anxieties, and
relations of domination (Tyner 1996, Cabezas 1998, Pike 1999, Doezema 2000). For
example, the figure of the ‘suffering third world prostitute’ serves to symbolize the excesses
of the global march of capital, and its negative effects on women. To view the campaign
against trafficking in women as an example of imposed ‘western feminism’ ignores the
national/cultural context in which these campaigns are formed. Writing on Nepal, for
example, Pike (1999) demonstrates how deeply current anti-trafficking campaigns are
embedded in culture and national history. Of course, many third world feminists reject the
image of ‘the third world women as helpless victims of either patriarchy or a crude,
undifferentiated capitalism’ (Sangera 1998: 1). A number of third world feminists and sex
workers are at the forefront of political efforts to resignify the place of the prostitute in
feminist politics (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).
Third world sex workers' organisations reject the abolitionist portrayal of themselves as
deluded and despairing (see Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). Neither is 'sex work
language', as Barry implies, a western concept picked up by ignorant third world sex
workers who are incapable of understanding its ramifications. While the term 'sex work'
was coined by Carol Leigh, a western sex worker (Leigh 1998), its rapid and wide-spread
adoption by sex workers the world over reflects a shared political vision. As Kempadoo
(1998) documents, sex workers in the third world have a centuries-old history of organizing
to demand an end to discriminatory laws and practices. Building on this history, sex worker
rights organizations are today flourishing all over the third world: 'Sex workers' struggles
are thus neither a creation of a western prostitutes' rights movement or the privilege of the
past three decades' (Kempadoo 1998: 21).
Third world sex workers have seen through the matronising attitude of who would save
them for their own good. It is worth quoting at length from the Sex Workers’ Manifesto
(DMSC 1997), produced at the First National Conference of Sex Workers in Calcutta
(attended by over 3,000 sex workers):
Like many other occupations, sex work is also an occupation… we systematically
find ourselves to be targets of moralizing impulses of dominant social groups,
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through missions of cleansing and sanitising, both materially and symbolically. If
and when we figure in political or developmental agendas, we are enmeshed in
discursive practices and practical projects which aim to rescue, rehabilitate,
improve, discipline, control or police us. Charity organizations are prone to rescue
us and put us in 'safe' homes, developmental organizations are likely to
'rehabilitate' us through meagre income generation activities, and the police seem
bent upon to regularly raid our quarters in the name of controlling 'immoral'
trafficking. Even when we are inscribed less negatively or even sympathetically
within dominant discourses we are not exempt from stigmatisation or social
exclusion. As powerless, abused victims with no resources, we are seen as objects
of pity (DMSC 1997: 2-3).
Missing sex workers
This denial of the legitimacy of the identity of ‘sex worker’ is the direct and necessary result
of CATW’s epistemology of sex work. CATW advocates claim to base their analysis on the
‘true’ experiences of prostitutes. According to Kathleen Barry, sex in prostitution ‘reduces
women to a body’ and is therefore necessarily harmful, whether there is consent or not
(1995). Consequently, prostitutes ‘true’ stories of pain and injury serve both to demonstrate
the rightness of her theory and are claimed as the empirical basis for that theory. The
testimonies of prostitutes thus assume the status of absolute truth. However, only certain
versions of prostitutes’ experience are considered ‘true’. Barry constructs the ‘injury’ of sex
in prostitution in a circular manner. Prostitution is considered always injurious because the
sex in it is dehumanising. However, the sex takes on this dehumanising character because it
takes place within prostitution. In this neat, sealed construction, there is no place for the
experiences of sex workers who claim their work is not harmful or alienating. For Barry
and CATW, the notion of a prostitute who is unharmed by her experience is an ontological
impossibility: that which cannot be. This is the ultimate exercise of power: to deny sex
workers our very existence, to insist that we cannot be.
In claiming the ‘injured prostitute’ as the basis of feminist truth, CATW feminists foreclose
the possibility of political confrontation with sex workers who claim a different experience,
by denying that we even exist. The metaphysical ‘disappearance’ of the sex worker was
echoed by the physical absence of any prostitutes in CATW’s lobby group. According to
CATW, there are no sex workers, only ‘prostituted women’. If ‘sex worker’ is a fictional
(illegitimate) identity created by the international networks of pimps, (and supported by
governments in their pay) it follows that those of us who adopt this false identity are either
deluded or frauds. Prostitution is dehumanising, and self-identified sex workers, according
to CATW, embrace our dehumanisation: we thus collude in our own disappearance. There
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is a hole where the prostitute should stand: a member of CATW recently characterized
prostitutes as ‘empty holes surrounded by flesh, waiting for a masculine deposit of
sperm'.120 Hoigard and Finstad (1992) whose work is held up as exemplary by Barry, refer
to sex workers’ vagina’s as ‘garbage can[s] for hordes of anonymous men’s ejaculations’
(quoted in Chapkis 1997: 51). Barry herself says that prostitutes become ‘interchangeable’
with plastic blow-up sex dolls ‘complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation’
(1995: 35) More than the most rampant version of patriarchy they could dream up, CATW
feminists identify the prostitute with her vagina. This echo within CATW of the patriarchal
and especially the pornographic is notable (see Brown 1995). The prostitute thus not only
lacks – consent, will, desire – she is lack. What CATW feminists most want of sex workers
is that they close their holes – shut their mouths, cross their legs – to prevent the taking in
and the spilling out of substances and words they find noxious.
The trafficker
Until now, this chapter has looked at the perceived threat to the state by the prostitute.
What of her ‘partner in crime’, the trafficker? As we saw in Chapter Four, the ‘rise of the
pimp system’ (Hobson 1987) was believed to be an integral element of ‘the white-slave
trade’. In white slavery accounts, this network of foreign pimps and procurers did not limit
their activities to enslaving innocent girls: we saw how Turner (1907, 1909) linked
organised networks of pimps to political corruption. The growth of the ‘sex trade’, its
increasingly ‘industrial’ characteristics, the links with other types of crime, and the control
of prostitution by ‘foreign criminal gangs’, were all key themes in the white slavery myth.
The ‘criminal underworld’ is once again foregrounded in trafficking narratives, with
‘criminal networks’ behind trafficking an article of faith, constantly repeated in accounts by
feminists, NGOs, police, journalists and politicians.121
120
This statement was made by Evelina Giobbe during the NGO Consultation with UN/IGOs on
Trafficking in Persons, Prostitution and the Global Sex Industry: "Trafficking and the Global Sex Industry:
The Need for a Human Rights Framework" 21-22 June 1999, Palais des Nations, Geneva.
121 Newspaper reports on trafficking seldom fail to raise the spectre of a vast international criminal syndicate.
The imagery used to describe these gangs is rife with metaphors of inescapability: ‘tentacles’, ‘net’, ‘ring’ , as in
this quote from a UK article: ‘Cambodia is the hub of a people-trafficking racket with tentacles stretching
across South-east Asia and links with several Asian mafias’ (The Independent 28-08-03.) The language used
often switches register from the neutral ‘criminal gangs’ to the more titillating ‘prostitution rings’ or ‘vice
rings’: ‘Under the new deal, a criminal could be prosecuted in one member state for operating a sex ring in
another member state’ (Reuters 28-09-01). This hooks into another widespread mythical image, that of the
‘pimp’. Both the ‘international criminal syndicate’ and the pimp of the prostitution ring are images which
carry heavy xenophobic and racist baggage. For example, Stenvoll (2002) in an article examining the response
of newspapers in Norway to the increase in Russian sex workers in the rural northern area of Finnmark,
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The picture that emerges is of a shadowy parallel structure, an underworld flourishing in
the absence of ‘borders’: actual state borders, but also the breakdown of ‘law and order’,
the result of the anarchy of globalisation and the unimpeded march of capital. This is not
new either – white slavery can be seen as a spasm of fear in reaction to the massive social
changes occurring on a global level in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th century.
This wave of globalisation saw massive upheavals in the world order, with huge
movements of people and challenges to capitalist ‘imperialism’. Dissatisfaction with the lot
of the global proletariat fuelled debate, demonstrations, and revolutions. As Marx famously
used prostitution as an example of and as a metaphor for capitalism, so too did other
forerunners of today’s anti-globalisation activists. The ‘No Logo’ of its time, Kauffman’s
novel The House of Bondage (1912) used the motif of white slavery to condemn capitalism. As
Haag (1999) notes, Kauffman’s novel ‘grimly diagnosed capitalist society itself as “a
gigantic house of bondage, in which the weak are enslaved by the strong”’ (p.70).
Anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman commented favourably on Kauffman’s work is her
essay The White Slave Traffic (1910). Goldman scorns the movement against white slavery as
a ‘brightly colored toy for babies’, arguing that the real evil of prostitution is nothing new
and will remain long after the crusaders against white slavery had made their careers.
According to Goldman, ‘the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid
labour,’ drives ‘thousands of women and girls into prostitution… these girls feel, ‘why
waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?’ (1910:
14)
For these commentators and activists, prostitution and white slavery served to symbolise
capitalism and to illustrate its worst excesses – in Haag’s phrase, they were the result of the
‘deceitful “freedoms” of capitalism’ (p. 89). A newspaper report on the Protocol
negotiations covers all the elements that give trafficking its current sense of urgency:
Trafficking is one segment of the brutal transnational organized crime system that
dehumanizes and devalues women and children. It’s a system that’s part of a
sophisticated network which relies on a nation’s dysfunctional economic, political
and social apparatus. Traffickers are nefarious entrepreneurs who view poverty
and depressed economies as a lucrative way to exploit a world without borders and
exploit women seeking a way out of misery. These criminals traffic women and
children like they traffic weapons and drugs. Often travelling the same routes as
trafficked drugs, human commodities rake in huge profits (White 2000).
shows how the focus in the reports in on the Russian mafia fits nicely into larger public discourses about the
assumed criminalisation of Russian society (p. 8).
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Reports like these send states scurrying for more border police and anti-globalisation
activists for more placards, as ‘globalisation’ inspires contradictory and confusing reactions
in society.
The terror of trafficking reached truly astonishing levels in President Bush’s September 24,
2003, speech to the United Nations, regarding the US position in Iraq and on terrorism.
Beginning with a reference to 9-11, moving through the occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq, Bush spent the last third of his speech denouncing trafficking as the financial base of
terrorism, and gave the fight against trafficking the same urgency as the war on terror. In
describing trafficking, Bush uses the same religious symbolic terms as when exhorting
against terror: ‘evil’. The ‘civilized world’ is portrayed as under threat from the uncivilised
forces of (barely qualified as) ‘fundamentalist’ Islam. The caricatures of the evil Arab
threatening decent, civilised – i.e. American – society is recognisable from white slavery
stories: Saddam Hussein as the cardboard, mustachio twirling villain with paintings of
pneumatic women in his palaces, Uday the sadistic whoremonger. The danger is dark,
literally in terms of skin colour, and is made all the more frightening because it is
sexualised.
The results of anti-trafficking campaigns
National laws on white slavery ended up rebounding on sex workers themselves, either to
protect her or the nation, and often these two forms of protection were elided, as both
sinner and sinned against, the wayward young girl was a threat that needed to be neutralised
through ‘rescue’ and ‘protection’. The tendency to turn towards the state for protection,
rather than questioning state power to regulate and discipline, is one that Brown sees as
especially problematic for feminism. She notes:
women have particular cause for greeting such politics with caution. Historically,
the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical in
legitimating women's exclusion from some spheres of human endeavour and
confinement within others. Operating simultaneously to link “femininity” to
privileged races and classes… protection codes are also markers and vehicles of
such divisions among women. Protection codes are thus key technologies in
regulating privileged women as well as intensifying the vulnerability and
degradation of those on the unprotected side of the constructed divide between
light and dark, wives and prostitutes, good girls and bad ones (1995: 165).
Feminist campaigns against trafficking emphasise the human rights violations committed
by ‘pimps’, ‘traffickers’ or clients against prostitutes. By contrast, sex worker organisations
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the world over identify the state, particularly the police, as the prime violators of sex
workers’ rights. The result of shifting the locus of concern from state repression of sex
workers to the individual acts of violent men is that these anti-trafficking campaigns often
lack a critical attitude towards the state. Ironically, the lack of recognition of state
repression of sex workers means that measures to combat trafficking often strengthen the
hand of the state at the expense of sex workers.
In her role as the archetypical, sexually violated female, the prostitute must be seen to be
undergoing her violation at the hands of a man. For sex workers, however, the space of
greatest violence occurs outside of the intimate sexual encounter, in their contact with the
state and its agents. Wherever sex workers gather – at conferences and meetings around the
world – violence by the police is at the top of the agenda. At a recent conference that I
attended of the National Network of Sex Workers in Kerala, India (March 3-8, 2003) –
attended by over 500 sex workers, many examples of horrific violence by the police were
recounted.
The overwhelming effect of feminist-inspired anti-trafficking policies and programmes has
been catastrophic for sex workers, especially those in developing countries. It was the
concern around trafficking that gave Swedish feminists the political opportunity to enact
legislation that penalises the customers of sex workers. In the United States, abolitionist
feminists worked hand in hand with anti-abortion activists to influence US trafficking
policy. From January 15, 2003, USAID field missions were informed that they were no
longer allowed to fund anti-trafficking projects who were ‘advocating prostitution as an
employment choice or which advocate or support the legalization of prostitution’ (Crago
2003).
Trafficking has also been linked with US international HIV/Aids prevention efforts. In
white slavery and trafficking, syphilis and Aids are metaphors that captures the dual role of
protection: of the young girl herself, and the need for protection of the community. A
telling use of the metaphor appeared in an article on the Vienna negotiations: ‘One reason
trafficking is spreading like the HIV/AIDS disease relates to a lack of national and
international laws that deal with the problem as an industry’ (White 2000). Tragically, it is
more than a metaphor. Under the US Global Aids Bill, in which the Bush administration
committed 15 Billion dollars to fight AIDS globally, all organisations which receive money
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are required to adopt a policy that is expressly against sex work as labour. This was the
direct result of the lobby efforts of the abolitionist feminist/conservative religious lobby.
The Network of Sex Work Projects issued a press release when the Bill was announced. It
reads:
This measure could have potentially devastating effects on sex workers, their
families and the wider communities in which they live. Projects working with sex
workers throughout the world do not ‘promote’ sex work as ‘lifestyle’. Especially
in poor countries, projects work with the twin aims of empowering sex workers to
protect themselves from HIV, while at the same time helping sex workers to
discover other means of generating income. These projects have a proven track
record when it comes to reducing HIV among sex workers. Denying them funding
is likely to have serious impact on infection rates among the poorest and most
vulnerable (NSWP 2003).
At the National Network of Sex Workers conference in Kerala, the international fight
against trafficking was unanimously declared to be the single biggest threat to sex worker
rights. In countries like India, hundreds of new anti-trafficking NGOs have sprung up, and
apply for funding that sex workers themselves are no longer eligible for. These NGOs
often operate so-called ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ policies. The ‘rescue’ policies they
advocate have been condemned by international human rights organisations as a major
cause of violence against sex workers (IHRLG 2001), yet they continue to be supported by
abolitionist feminists. Donna Hughes calls ‘report and rescue’ a ‘bold new method’. She
describes it as follows: ‘under this approach aid workers have a duty to catalyse a rescue.
They can do so through the official report, or by notifying a nongovernmental or faithbased group that specializes in rescuing enslaved women and girls’ (Hughes 2003a). She
goes on to attack the Network of Sex Work projects for its policy on sex worker rights.
In a statement released in response to this article, NSWP member Empower Foundation in
Thailand responds:
Far from being a ‘bold new method’ as is being proclaimed, Empower Chiang Mai
has been dealing with the issue of “raids and rescues” of women working in
brothels for the past 11 years’ (Empower 2003:1) Empower goes on to record one
such ‘rescue’ that occurred in May 2003: ‘Journalists and photographers also
accompanied the police and “rescue team”. Photos of the women were taken
without their consent and appeared in the local papers…Women who were
“rescued” understood they had been arrested. They had their belongings taken
from them. They were separated from each other. They were unable to contact
friends, family or Empower…In all 28 women were “rescued”. Some of the
women were not employees of that brothel but were simply visiting friends when
they were “rescued”. Women were transported by Trafcord and the police against
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their will to a Public Welfare Boys Home. Nineteen women were locked inside and
have remained there for the past 31 days. We have no information on the
whereabouts or situation the other ten women (Empower 2003: 2).
This is just one example of many abuses that occur around the world in the name of
‘protecting’ women.
Disappearing sex workers?
In this chapter, I have examined how the sex worker disappeared in the CATW lobby
through the denial of sex worker as identity. I have demonstrated how the powerful ideas
around white slavery continue to influence today’s abolitionist feminists, through the figure
of the suffering third world prostitute. Through making consent to prostitution impossible,
abolitionist feminists epistemologically reposition the prostitute as a slave, in need of
feminist intervention to save her.
However, it is of course not only abolitionist feminists who are concerned with the welfare
of prostitutes. We need also to examine the influence of the white slave on the ‘liberal’
feminists who made up the Human Rights Caucus. As explained in Chapter One, at the
heart of GAATW-influenced ‘liberal’ feminist analysis of trafficking is the distinction
between voluntary and forced prostitution, and the corollary view of freely chosen, adult
prostitution as work (see Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997, GAATW 1997, Doezema 1998). At
first glance, it appears as if the ‘sex worker’ forms the solid basis for the analysis and
activism of this group. But as the performance of the HRC at the negotiations shows,
appearances can be deceiving. The prostitute inhabits the ‘site of sexual violence’ in even
the most liberal feminist imaginations.122 While in some feminist imaginations she may be
better equipped to negotiate that violence than in others, she remains defined by it. If sex
workers ‘disappeared’ in CATW’s definition through their being transformed into ‘sex
slaves’, this HRC position of trafficking works a similar magic. Paradoxically, the best way
of protecting sex workers’ rights in the debate on defining trafficking was by making sex
workers invisible. These deceptive appearances form the subject of the following chapter.
122
The phrase ‘site of sexual violence’ is taken from a comment made by a leading feminist at an antitrafficking conference in Delhi conference (January 6-9, 2004). She argued for the continued importance for
feminism of the idea of sexuality as a ‘site of violence’.
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Chapter Six: Now you see her, now you don’t: consent, sex workers and
the Human Rights Caucus
The presence of sex worker rights activists in the Vienna negotiations was a marked
departure from the white slavery debates. However, sex worker involvement in the antitrafficking debates is marked by a slow start and a reluctant continuation. Though sex
worker rights groups and anti-trafficking organisations had worked together prior to the
Protocol negotiations, as explained in Chapter One, sex worker rights movements were
slow to recognise the resurgence of trafficking as an international issue, and even after
recognition have been rather reluctant participants in anti-trafficking activities. Why is this
so? I believe that this can be explained through the relationship between sex workers rights
and feminism, most particularly in the issue of (sexual) ‘violence’; which is articulated in
feminism through the concept of consent. The conflicts, similarities and differences in
perception of ‘consent’ were to mark the ‘joint lobby’ of sex worker rights activists and
anti-trafficking activists in Vienna.
Sex worker advocates from the Network of Sex Work Projects advocated positions jointly
with other members of the Human Rights Caucus, and co-drafted lobby documents. Yet,
the NSWP is not mentioned in any of the documents produced by the HRC, nor is it an
official signatory on any of these documents. In an ironic echo of the CATW lobby, sex
workers ‘disappeared’ from the HRC. What led to this disappearance? The answer to this
question is linked to a second ‘disappearing move’: the HRC strategy of seeking to remove
all mention of prostitution from the proposed definition of trafficking. This two-fold
disappearance of sex workers was paradoxically facilitated by the inclusion of sex worker
activists in the Human Rights Caucus lobby, as sex worker activists themselves chose to
mask their presence. This is intriguing, as it is often assumed that participation heightens
visibility and voice. Sex worker activists have long demanded the right to speak for
ourselves in reaction to feminists whose activities have been read as a silencing of the sex
worker voice (L. Bell 1987; Alexander and Delacoste 1987).
The implications (for the relationship between sex worker rights and feminism) of the
disappearance of sex workers from the ‘liberal’ HRC lobby may be even more profound
than those of the disappearance of the sex worker in abolitionist discourse. This chapter
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examines in detail the strategy of de-linking of prostitution and trafficking that the HRC
advanced at the negotiations. In particular, I will examine the ‘double disappearance’ of sex
workers in the HRC lobby. I look at the two levels of discourse, each corresponding with
one disappearing move. The first is the level of practice: the actual participation of sex
workers in the HRC lobby. The second is the level of the definition of trafficking, the level
at which meaning-making took place. These two moves are linked in an intricate shadow
play, with deceptive sleights-of-hand obscuring, then revealing, the sex worker. Discernable
in these shadows is the ghostly figure of the white slave, the mythical maiden whose
presence haunted the negotiations.
De-linking prostitution and trafficking
The Human Rights Caucus urged delegates to opt for a definition of trafficking that would
avoid linking ‘prostitution’ and trafficking together. We supported a definition that focused
on coercion, and that did not specify the purpose for which a person is trafficked. The
essence of the Caucus view on trafficking is contained in the following paragraph, taken
from one of our lobby documents:
The core elements of the act of trafficking are the presence of deception, coercion
or debt bondage and the exploitative or abusive purpose for which the deception,
coercion or debt bondage is employed. Typically the deception involves the
working conditions or the nature of the work to be done. For example, the victim
may have agreed to work in the sex industry but not to be held in slavery-like
conditions or to work in a factory but not in a brothel. The nature of the labour or
services provided as such, including those in the sex industry, are irrelevant to the
question of whether or not the victim’s human rights are violated. The trafficker’s
use of deceit, coercion, or debt bondage to force the victim to work in slavery-like
or exploitative or abusive conditions deprive the victim of her or his free will and
ability to control her or his body, which constitutes serious violation of the
fundamental rights of all human beings’ (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary, Jan
1999: para. 6).
The HRC stance was grounded in the commitment to stopping trafficking of all persons,
male and female, for all sorts of labour. While it is true that this commitment maintained a
gender focus (which sits uneasily with the simultaneous commitment to a genderless
subject of anti-trafficking activism, as examined below), the HRC and organisations that
supported its efforts had genuinely come to believe that anti-trafficking activity had to
widen its scope beyond ‘women and children’.123 In response to the definition contained in
123 This
was a gradual change in focus for GAATW affiliated anti-trafficking organisations. For example, a
1997 GAATW report on trafficking was entitled Trafficking in Women for the Purposes of Prostitution, Forced labour
and Marriage (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997). This report contained a definition of trafficking that still
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a first draft of the Protocol, which linked trafficking to prostitution, the HRC argued that
the draft
focuses unnecessarily on one particular form of labour abuse, that in the sex
industry…the special reference to prostitution …is a gratuitous response to the
current public hysteria surrounding this particular from of trafficking…the references
to prostitution and ‘sexual exploitation’ should be deleted from [the definition] (HRC
Recommendations and Commentary, Jan. 1999: para 4, emphasis added).
The proposal to de-link trafficking completely from prostitution was an attempt to break
with genealogy. To have an international agreement on trafficking that made no mention at
all of prostitution would be truly radical, showing that the genealogy of the myth of white
slavery could be beaten: it would amount to an epistemological revision of trafficking.
However, the effort to move trafficking beyond ‘prostitution’ to ‘coerced migration for
forced labour’ was ultimately unsuccessful.
Putting the lobby together
From the very beginning of the HRC, sex worker rights advocates worked together with
anti-trafficking activists. This commitment on the part of anti-trafficking activists to
involve sex workers went beyond a desire to ‘listen’ to sex workers or to consult with sex
workers. It involved actively searching for funds to enable the participation of sex workers
in the lobby during the meetings in Vienna. The Human Rights Caucus attended each of
the meetings on the Protocol, and sex worker activists took part every time. All documents
used by the Human Rights Caucus during the meetings were drafted with significant input
from the NSWP sex worker activists. So, in a number of ways, the HRC can be seen as
partnership, with sex workers participating at all levels.
Nonetheless, for the NSWP advocates, the decision to participate in the lobby presented us
with a dilemma. On the one hand, we recognised that working through a lobby was
necessary if we hoped to have any influence on the Protocol. On the other, because sex
workers questioned the legitimacy of the anti-trafficking framework, they were reluctant to
lend support to the creation of an international anti-trafficking agreement. Sex worker
activists, given years of personal experience with well-meaning legal changes, were highly
mentioned prostitution, albeit forced. By the time of the 2001 GAATW Human Rights Standards, however,
the phrase trafficking in women had been dropped in favour of ‘trafficking in persons’. The Human Rights
Standards use gender-neutral language throughout, and suggests a definition of trafficking that does not
mention any specific type of occupation or service for which a person might be trafficked. The Standards, do,
however, contain sections of gender analysis of trafficking.
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skeptical about the possible benefits of any new international legislation on trafficking. As
examined in Chapter One, a reoccurring argument in sex worker rights movements has
been the need for ‘decriminalisation’: that all sex-work specific offences should be removed
from criminal law, and no new ones created. Instead, it has been argued that existing laws
covering sexual violence and workers’ rights should be applied to sex work. This argument
recognises that the maintenance of prostitutes as a separate category under criminal law
reinforces their treatment as ‘outsiders’, as people to whom the protections afforded others
under the law did not apply. This argument was extended to international level in a joint
report that I co-wrote with Jo Bindman of the human rights organisation Anti-Slavery
International. This report examined how a range of human rights abuses in sex work,
including those referred to under trafficking, would be covered if existing international law
was applied to sex workers (Bindman and Doezema 1997).
‘When trafficking is a target, prostitutes will also become a target’
A number of NGOs and individuals working in the field of trafficking in women and
human rights began communicating with each other late in 1998 about the proposed new
Protocol, with the view to influencing the outcome of the negotiations by forming a lobby.
This preliminary, informal group consisted of anti-trafficking groups who supported the
idea that sex work should be viewed as legitimate labour, and was initiated by Ann Jordan
of the International Human Rights Law Group, Washington D.C., and Marjan Wijers of
the Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV) the Netherlands. Via email and
informal meetings, they contacted other anti-trafficking and sex worker rights activists.
Emails aimed at hammering out a strategy for lobbying began in December 1998, using the
NSWP email list and informal face-to-face meetings.124 I received my first email about the
draft Protocol on Dec. 15, 1998. Out of these initial discussions a ‘core group’ of
individuals and organisations emerged, who were to be actively involved in lobbying in
Vienna over the next two years.
The first email discussions, which started about a month before the first meeting,
scheduled for January 1999, dealt with the draft for the trafficking Protocol proposed by
124
The emails concerning the Protocol circulated on two lists that I was a member of. The first is the NSWP
list, a facilitated list for all those who support the NSWP aims. Membership is through nomination and
seconding by existing list members. The other list (or group) was that of the Human Rights Caucus, and
consisted of NSWP members, ant-trafficking activists and human rights activists. This group was limited to
those who actively participated in strategy and/or lobbying. NSWP-list mails are referred to in the text as
‘NSWP-list’, Human Rights Caucus mails as ‘HRC list’.
166
the United States (A/AC.254/4/add.3).125 The first ‘fault line’ that developed between sex
worker rights activists and anti-trafficking activists was on how to react to the proposed
Protocol. In this first stage of the lobby, two very different positions emerged. The NSWP
favoured lobbying against the adoption of the Protocol, while anti-trafficking activists
favoured lobbying to improve it.
Two quotes from emails from sex workers to the nascent HRC lobby group show how
sceptical NSWP activists were about the possible benefits of the proposed international
anti-trafficking legislation:
you might believe that you are helping ‘women and children’ by calling for new
anti-sex laws or even new laws. However, without clearly defining what laws will
be made you will likely hurt the very people you aim to help. Almost always the
new laws operate against the sex industry (which world wide is a major source of
income for many women who in turn support their children with this money).
Additionally men who work in the sex industry will be harmed by new anti-sex
laws but often their difficulties are never discussed or disguised by the ‘women and
children’ banner (HRC list, 19/12/98):
the anti-trafficking framework is inherently problematic in the way it essentializes
and separates certain kind (sic) of abuses in the industry which are connected to
protection of national borders. Obviously the stakes become slanted for nations
that pretend to help ‘women’, defined as ‘good women who don’t want to do
prostitution’. Mostly the states just wanted (sic) 1.) control borders 2) give
government workers like cops a chance to use their muscle on prostitutes…when
trafficking is a target, prostitutes will also become a target (HRC list 20/12/98).
Another issue for NSWP activists was the perceived lack of commitment on the part of
anti-trafficking activists to fighting against anti-prostitution initiatives:
Instead of me criticizing this document [the draft protocol], those from antitrafficking groups should be using this space to organize a response to the antiprostitution stance of this document. This response should be developed now and released
the moment this thing passes in a form which equates prostitution with trafficking… I come
back to the basic question. How far are you all going to go to protest this? (HRC
list 20/12/98, emphasis in original).
‘Be radical’? Protest or engagement
Out of the ‘core group’ discussions a strategy for lobbying began to emerge. Marjan Wijers
and Ann Jordan secured funding for people to attend the Crimes Commission meetings,
and they drafted a first critique of the proposed Protocol. This draft was circulated on the
NSWP list for comments, as well as on the HRC list. NSWP members needed to decide
what form their participation in lobbying activities should take: whether they should lobby
125
The Argentine proposal for the draft Protocol (A/AC.254/8), submitted concurrently to the Crimes
Commission, came to our attention a few weeks later. These two draft proposals were combined into one for
the March 1999 meeting.
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as a separate group, or together with the anti-trafficking activists. One activist wrote:
‘Action needed. I am sending everyone the proposed Protocol on trafficking in women and
children…In brief, it sucks...the NSWP should lobby in its own way and critique the
document’ (NSWP list 19/12/98). On 21st December, the coordinator of the NSWP called
for a specific NSWP response to the draft Protocol with input from all members via the
NSWP listserve. At the same time, we decided to continue to engage with the antitrafficking activists and provide help by commenting on the critique drafted by Marjan
Wijers and Ann Jordan.
Once the NSWP decided to write its own critique of the Protocol, the key question became
how we should frame it: as a straightforward protest against the adoption of a new
international legislation on trafficking, or as a critique aimed at improving the Protocol.
Initially, we decided to try to find a way to combine both positions in a single critique: to
be both reformist and radical. The first draft of the NSWP commentary thus stated: ‘The
NWSP recommends that delegates vote against the document in its entirety. If the Protocol
is to be modified then the NSWP recommends [a number of changes]’ (NSWP list 16-0199).
NSWP list exchanges about this draft show that members felt uncomfortable with the
duality of the protest/reform position. One mail suggested that the NSWP effort would be
less effective if it tried both to suggest improvements at the same time urge rejection of the
Protocol:
while I agree wholeheartedly that the main problem with the document is that it
exists at all, I wonder if we lose credibility if we argue that delegates should vote
against it. That is, if we really want to try and change the document. We could, of
course, choose to take a principled stand, and argue absolutely and only against
adoption. This may be a strategic option, as other organisations such as the Global
Alliance Against Trafficking and Anti-slavery International will be arguing for the
sorts of changes that we support – well not exactly support, but the sort of damage
limitation we recognise is necessary. We could then go on record as a ‘protest’
voice. Or we could… go for both, but I am worried that this weakens both
positions. What do others think? (NSWP list18-01-99).
Discussion on the list led to a majority of NSWP members agreeing that to express this
dualistic position in our public response to the Protocol would be ineffective. The NSWP
position paper was re-drafted and the recommendations for changing the Protocol
removed, leaving only the recommendation that delegates reject the Protocol in its entirety.
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The first paragraph of the NSWP statement on the Protocol established the NSWP
‘protest’ position with regards to an anti-trafficking approach:
Historically, anti-trafficking measures have been more concerned with protecting
women's 'purity' than with ensuring the human rights of those in the sex industry.
This approach limits the protection afforded by these instruments to those who
can prove that they did not consent to work in the sex industry. It also ignores the
abusive conditions within the sex industry, often facilitated by national laws that
place (migrant) sex workers outside of the range of rights granted to others as
citizens and workers (NSWP, Commentary on the Draft Protocol, Jan. 1999).
Visible protest, invisible influence
While the NSWP decided to take an official position against the adoption of the Protocol,
we recognised that there was little chance that the delegates to the UN would heed our
calls. In order to be able to continue to exercise influence on the debate, we agreed that we
would continue to work with the anti-trafficking lobby group, but as individuals, rather
than NSWP representatives. The decision to join with the Caucus, to commit ourselves as
sex worker rights activists to a position that we could not wholeheartedly support, was not
an easy one, and remained difficult throughout the entire two years of the negotiations.
Our strategy, though in a number of ways successful (as discussed below), nonetheless
caused a great deal of frustration for me and the other sex worker activists who took part.
One the one hand, we felt that our participation was vital to ensuring the maintenance of a
strong sex worker rights perspective within the Human Rights Caucus. As one NSWP
member expressed it:
as a person who works closely with the human rights organizations based in the
US… I have seen them utilize precedents and conventions uncritically on occasion
and advocate (by mistake) for things which would very much hurt the sex industry.
Please do not consider this a strong criticism of any human rights organization
here in the US… but I think we all are aware how in the zeal to ‘protect women
from traffickers’ some organizations promote actions which are harmful (NSWP
lists, 19-01-99).
On the other, we realised that the best possible outcome of our efforts would nonetheless
still be a new international agreement on trafficking, which we felt could only ever harm
sex workers, rather than protect them.
Our first disappearing move was an attempt to resolve this dilemma, enabling us to publicly
reject the trafficking framework and at the same time use our presence to influence the
Human Rights Caucus position. The result of this strategy was the supremely ironic
position of the invisible presence of sex workers in the HRC lobby. For many of us, who
were used to taking on a highly visible and public role as sex workers and activists, this was
169
a strange position to be in. As we buttonholed delegates between sessions, politely waited
to discuss our latest document with a delegate, or earnestly argued the merits of a particular
point, the ‘secret sex workers’ in the Human Rights Caucus were highly visible yet invisible;
there but not there.
Now you see her, now you don’t
My own participation in the HRC lobby was very much an example of the ‘invisible’ sex
worker. For example, at the first session in January 1999, I was the only representative of
the NSWP to attend as part of the Human Rights Caucus. However, I was ‘officially’
registered for the meeting as a representative of Anti-Slavery International, as only NGOs
with ECOSOC consultative status were allowed to attend the negotiations. Thus, on the
official, public list of NGO observers for the meeting, I was registered as ‘Jo Doezema,
Anti-Slavery International’, rather than ‘Network of Sex Work Projects’.
The Human Rights Caucus grew out of already existing personal and political networks and
friendships. I was able to attend as an Anti-Slavery International representative because I
had collaborated with them on the report referred to above. That collaboration itself grew
out of a existing relationship. These close relationships also enabled us to function on a
shoestring budget, doubling or tripling up in grungy hotel rooms, staying up late drafting
and re-drafting lobby documents and up again early in the morning to lobby. We relied on
the local migrant and sex worker NGOs to help us with last-minute photocopying, or
rushed around Vienna in the early hours looking for a copy shop that could produce
hundreds of copies in a few hours. Through these existing networks, we were also able to
develop close relationships with certain delegates, in particular those from the Netherlands,
Thailand, and (for the first year) the Philippines. This relationship included meeting
informally during sessions for dinner and drinks to discuss and develop arguments. These
relationships were extremely important, as the only way that NGOs could influence the
language of the document was through working with delegates.
By the time of this first meeting, the NSWP advocates had decided on the strategy of using
our influence within the Human Rights Caucus, rather than lobbying separately for
delegates to reject the document. As I recorded in my report of the first session, sent
to the NSWP list:
We all agreed to give the NSWP recommendations to any delegate we spoke to,
and to explain briefly what they were about. Our lobbying strategy was, however,
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to push for changes in the draft Protocol, as according to the HRLG (Human
Rights Law Group) recommendations, rather than argue for complete rejection of
the draft protocol, as the NSWP paper urged. This was in accordance with the
strategy that was agreed in discussions on this list. The NSWP document was a
'protest', that explained why trafficking was the wrong framework to deal with
labour and human rights abuses for migration in the sex industry. The HRLG
recommendations were 'practical', i.e. they addressed what could be changed in the
Draft Protocol to make it least harmful (NSWP list, 02-01-99).
In order to ensure that the ‘protest voice’ went on record, HRC lobbyists handed out
copies of the NSWP Commentary as well as the HRC Commentary (drafted with NSWP
input).
This made for a rather uneasy balance within the Caucus, with the NSWP strategy not
clearly understood by our anti-trafficking counterparts in the Caucus. One anti-trafficking
activist in the delegation wrote privately to me, expressing her concern that we were
contradicting each other and confusing the delegates (personal mail, 08-02-99). In my own
lobbying, I explained to delegates that the NSWP document was produced by sex worker
rights groups, who had asked us as the Human Rights Caucus to pass on our concerns to
the delegates. It was, as mentioned above, strange to be unable to ‘own’ this document, to
not let on that I was not one of the sex workers activists. However, my ‘invisibility’ as a sex
worker went further than not lobbying as an NSWP representative.
‘Appearance is everything’
Though we worked extremely well together and developed close personal relationships,
some tensions between the NSWP members and the other members of the Caucus
remained. Certain anti-trafficking members of the HRC were worried that if we were
identified with sex worker rights activism, the efficacy of our lobby would be decreased. A
highly personal, perhaps symbolic expression of this was the reaction to the way that I
dressed for lobbying. One of the senior Caucus members was worried that it was ‘too sexy’,
and she suggested changes of outfit a number of times. It wasn’t said, but I experienced her
fear as meaning that I looked too much like a prostitute. While I agree that lobbying in
fishnets and mini-skirt would not have been a good idea, my sober grey trousers and longsleeved top seemed to me to be entirely appropriate lobbying garb. Some caucus members
shared this fear about how I dressed, but others felt it was misplaced. We reached a point
that we treated the matter jokingly as a group, and I threatened to appear in stilettos and
push-up bra.
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Nonetheless, I felt a real pressure to change my appearance, which led me to question
myself. Had I spent so much time doing political activism as a sex worker that I didn’t
know how to dress for other political work? Sartorial standards for sex worker rights
activism are very specific. The unofficial slogan of the NSWP is ‘appearance is everything’,
and it is only semi-ironic. The fishnets, high-heels and other symbols of sex work (which
differ according to different national, ethnic and sex worker cultures) are standard apparel
for sex worker demonstrations and performances. On a purely strategic level, these
accoutrements ensure that sex worker protests are not ignored – they are almost
guaranteed to make the papers. On another level, they serve to celebrate stigmatised sex
work cultures by publicly wearing the symbols of a despised identity.126
It seemed to me that this was an instance of the stigma of sex work reaching into our own
lobby group. This was another aspect of the ‘invisibility’ of sex workers: we could be there,
as long as we did not appear to be sex workers.127
The disappearing prostitute and the definition of trafficking
The hidden presence of sex workers in the Human Rights Caucus themselves mirrored the
way the Human Rights Caucus argued around ‘sex work’ in their lobbying efforts at the
International Crimes Commission. I now move to an examination of this second level of
discourse, focusing on the process of defining the crime of trafficking in persons during
the negotiations.
The definition of trafficking as contained in the final version of the Protocol reads:
For the purposes of this Protocol:
(a)
"Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation,
transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or
other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or
of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of
exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the
prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services,
slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
126
As symbols, they also allow for the submergence of personal identity in the group. Sometimes, sex
workers will demonstrate masked, either because they can’t risk public identification as sex workers or to
show solidarity with those in this position.
127 Gail Pheterson’s exploration of this in her book, The Whore Stigma (1986) has been very influential on my
political development.
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(b)
The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended
exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of
the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;
(c)
The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child
for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered "trafficking in persons" even if this
does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;
(d)
"Child" shall mean any person under eighteen years of age (A/55/385).
Like much international law, this statement is not notable for its elegance, succinctness or
coherence. The ambiguities in the text reflect the uneasy compromise delegates made
around principle disagreements as to the purpose and subject of the Protocol. On one side
were the delegates who felt that the Protocol should take a firm anti-prostitution position.
On the other were delegates, who for a variety of reasons, were reluctant to equate
prostitution with trafficking under this agreement. These basic differences found
expression in protracted discussions about the meaning of ‘consent’ and the place it should
take in the definition of the text.
A comparison of two guides to the Trafficking Protocol, written after the negotiations were
completed, shows radically opposing interpretations of the definition of trafficking in
persons, along the lines sketched above. Ann Jordan, of the Human Rights Caucus, writes:
The terms ‘exploitation of the prostitution of others’ and ‘sexual exploitation’ are
not defined in the Protocol or anywhere else in international law. They are
undefined and included in the definition as a means to end an unnecessary
yearlong debate over whether or not voluntary adult prostitution should be
defined as trafficking. Delegates were unable to reach any agreement on this point
and so finally compromised on the last day of the negotiations by leaving the terms
undefined…Thus, the compromise recognises the difference between forced (or involuntary) and
voluntary adult participation in sex work (Jordan 2002: 32, emphasis added).
We can compare this statement to Janice Raymond’s, of CATW:
From the beginning of the Ad Hoc Committees deliberations, a small group of
NGOs supporting prostitution as work, and voluntary trafficking as migration for
sex work, lobbied to limit the definition of trafficking to forced or coerced
trafficking, to omit any mention of trafficking for prostitution or sexual
exploitation, and to delete the term victims from the text as being too emotive.
Along with countries that had legalized/regulated prostitution as labor, they
worked to restrict protections for victims by limiting the definition to only those
women who could prove they had been forced into trafficking. Fortunately, the
majority of countries – many of them from the less wealthy and sending countries
for trafficking – wanted a definition that protected all victims of trafficking and
that was not limited to force or coercion’ (Raymond 2001: 4).
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How can we explain these differences? In order to examine how this situation came about,
I look at consent and how it operated at the negotiations. The vagaries of consent allowed
both ‘sides’ – lobbyists as well as state delegations – to claim victory in the ‘consent’ wars.
Your definition or mine?
The issue of consent was controversial right from the start of the negotiations. As part of
the informal working group of the Crimes Commission, the United States and Argentina
had both expressed particular concern about the need for an agreement on trafficking. For
Argentina, the issue of trafficking in children was paramount. Both countries took the
initiative to prepare a draft for the trafficking protocol. Both of these drafts were submitted
for discussion during the first session. Through comparing these first two versions of the
Protocol, we can see the core differences that were to simmer below the surface during the
first year, rising to nearly derail the entire Protocol during the final sessions.
The first thing to note is that both of the proposals explicitly link trafficking to
prostitution. In terms of their approach to prostitution, the Argentine proposal was
abolitionist, while the US proposal was a confused mixture of abolitionism and the
limitation of trafficking to situations of force. The two drafts defined trafficking as follows:
Argentina:
Article 3
(b) “International trafficking in children” shall mean any act carried out or to be
carried out for an illicit purpose….
(c)“International trafficking in women” shall mean any act carried out or to be
carried out for an illicit purpose…..
(d) “Illicit purpose or aim” shall mean:….
(iii) The prostitution or other form of sexual exploitation of a woman or child,
even with the consent of that person (A/AC/254/8).
United States:
Article 2
2. For purpose of this Protocol, “trafficking in persons” means the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons:
(a) By the threat or use of kidnapping, force, fraud, deception or coercion; or
(b) By the giving or receiving of unlawful payments or benefits to achieve the
consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of
prostitution or other sexual exploitation or forced labour.
3. For purpose of this Protocol, trafficking in persons for the purpose of
prostitution includes subjecting to such trafficking a child under the age of consent
(in the jurisdiction where the offence occurs), regardless of whether
that child has consented (A/AC.254/4/Add.3).
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These definitions differ in three main ways, indicated by three key terms. The first of these
differences concerns the gender of the subject of the proposals. Here the key term is
‘women and children’. Both proposals refer in their title to ‘trafficking in women and
children’. It is in the body of the text that the differences between the two proposals comes
out. The Argentine proposal refers throughout to ‘women and children’, while the US
proposal switches to the gender-neutral ‘trafficking in persons’. This difference was
significant enough to be included in a footnote to the official UN draft when the two
proposals were combined for the March 1999 session:
The proposal by Argentina is restricted to trafficking in women and children. The
proposal by the United States, while recognizing that women and children are
particularly vulnerable to trafficking, applies to trafficking in all persons. Whenever
this issue arises in this combined text, both options are given
(A/AC.254/4/Add.3/Rev.1: fn. 1).
The second of these is to be found in the definition of trafficking, specifically, the purposes
for which a woman or child could be trafficked. Here ‘prostitution’ and ‘sexual
exploitation’ are the key terms. In this usage, there is more similarity between the
proposals, as the phrases used are nearly identical: ‘prostitution or other form of sexual
exploitation’ (Argentina); ‘prostitution or other sexual exploitation’ (US). It is clear from
this that the United States proposal, which here equates prostitution with sexual
exploitation, was never intended to recognise ‘voluntary’ prostitution (as alleged by the
CATW lobby, examined below). The inclusion of the phrase, ‘forced labour’ as a term
distinct from prostitution, makes it even more obvious that prostitution was not considered
as a form of labour in this draft.
The third of these key terms is the one that was to prove most controversial at the
negotiations – consent. Both proposals include the term. In the US proposal, it functions
to distinguish between what is to be considered trafficking in the case of adults, and what is
to be considered trafficking in the case of children. Children can be trafficked ‘even with
their consent’, that is, without the use of force or deception. For adults, fraud or coercion
is necessary for them to have been considered ‘trafficked’, rather than as undocumented
migrants. The Argentine proposal does not distinguish between child and adult on the basis
of consent. In this proposal, in the case of both women and children, trafficking for ‘sexual
exploitation’ can occur ‘even with the consent of that person’.
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If the phrase ‘even with the consent of that person’ sounds familiar, it is because it is nearly
identical to those contained in the agreements on white slavery. This is one obvious, lexical
way in which the myth of white slavery shaped the negotiations. The Argentine proposal
echoes the language of the abolitionist 1933 International Convention for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Women, which stated that trafficking in women occurred ‘even with her consent’.
In its Preamble, the Argentine proposal refers to the abolitionist 1949 Convention (a
reference that would come back to haunt the negotiations).
Missing men
After considering the two drafts of the protocol during the first session (January 1999) the
delegates decided to combine the drafts at the March 1999 (third) session.128 However, the
Argentine and the US definitions of trafficked differed so essentially that they were unable
to be combined seamlessly into one document. Thus, the March 1999 version of the draft
Protocol contained two options for the definition of trafficking. The US definition became
‘Option One’, and the Argentine option became ‘Option Two’. The core differences
between these two definitions were to form the background for the most contentious
debates both between NGOs and between state delegates at the negotiations.
This combined draft still referred in its title only to ‘trafficking in women and children’.
‘Women and children’ in the title of the draft Protocol reveals that the concern of the
drafters was with prostitution: the ‘special vulnerability’ of women and children referred to
in the Argentine draft is a sexual vulnerability: ‘Bearing in mind that these two categories of
person [women and children] are more vulnerable than men to the risk of being victims of
certain types of illicit acts’ (UN 1999 A/AC.254/8: Preamble, emphasis in original). The
‘illicit acts’ referred to are sexual acts including prostitution, pornography and ‘sex tourism’,
and are all dealt with in detail in the Argentine definition of trafficking. The phrase ‘illicit
acts’ seems a strange one in this context, an ‘illicit act’ carrying heavy moral overtones of
sexual wrongdoing, rather than a reference to a violent crime committed by an organised
criminal group. It is close to the ‘immoral acts’ with which the turn of the century white
slavery agreements defined trafficking. Its use in the Argentine draft reveals the moral
underpinnings of the discussions in Vienna.
128
The Trafficking Protocol was not discussed during the second session.
176
The Argentine proposal, contained in the ‘Option Two’ definition was supported by the
CATW lobby group. As shown in the preceding chapter, one way abolitionist feminists
make the prostitute ‘disappear’ is by removing her sexual adulthood. It can be argued that
under liberalist ideology, sexual adulthood is for women is achieved through their ability to
consent to sex. Viewed in this way, it is not that a pre-defined adult woman is deemed
capable of consenting to sex: rather, the ability to consent to sex is what determines her
adulthood. For boys and men, the situation is different. When classified as ‘children’,
males are deemed unable to consent to sex.129 However, adulthood for men is not
determined by the ability to consent to sex, but by no longer being bound by consent.
Children can never consent to sex, adult women can sometimes consent to sex, adult men
never need to say ‘no’ to heterosexual sex. Men become adult through sexual desire,
women through sexual receptiveness. The consent standard so inscribes the duality of
active male and passive female sexuality, it is hard to believe that feminists continue to
advocate it with such force. Even more astounding, is the centrality of the consent standard
for sex worker rights advocates, when active female sexuality is the subject.
The Human Rights Caucus supported a modified version the US proposal for the
definition as contained of Option One. We argued that Option Two, (the Argentine
proposal) was:
problematic in that it does not clearly set out the elements of trafficking and
contains numerous undefined and problematic terms and concepts….Women are
deemed incapable of consenting to any of the activities described in the definitions
[of trafficking in women and children], as are children. Adult women are not
children and should not be treated as such (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary,
March 1999: para 7).
We further commented on the definition of ‘illicit purpose’ in the Argentine proposal:
These provisions conflict with laws in the states where it is legal to be a prostitute
and/or operate a brothel, produce pornography, etc. There are two distinct issues
not covered here: one, is the ability of children to work in the sex industry and,
two, the right of adults to work in the sex industry. This provision deprives adult
women to work in any aspect of the sex industry that someone might consider
prostitution or “sexual exploitation”. Instead of attempting to shut down the sex
industry, even in countries where it is legal, the Protocol should distinguish
between adults, especially women, and children. It should also avoid adopting a
patronizing stance that reduces women to the level of children, in the name of
‘protecting’ women. Such a stance historically has ‘protected’ women out of their
rights (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary, March 1999: para 7).
129
Except of course in the amazingly paradoxical situation of a male child being deemed capable of rape, a
fine example of the consent conundrum.
177
We also argued that only a ‘neutral’ protocol could give adequate recognition and
protection to men who were trafficked, and suggested that delegates delete all language
limiting the scope of the Protocol to ‘women and children’. We argued that the phrase
‘paying particular attention to the protection of women and children’ was unnecessarily
limiting, as the human rights of all trafficked persons needed to be protected:
The Protocol should not imply that the need to recognize and protect the human
rights of women and children takes priority over the need to recognize and protect
the human rights of men or any other vulnerable group or minority’ (HRC
Recommendations and Commentary, March 1999: para 2).
‘Victim’ or person?
In accordance with our position on the limiting effects of the phrase ‘women and children’,
we argued that the term ‘trafficking victim’, which was used throughout the combined
(March) draft Protocol, be replaced with ‘trafficked persons’. ‘Trafficking victim’, we
argued, carried heavily genderised notions of powerlessness. Our point was underscored by
comparison with the concurrent negotiations around the Protocol on migrant smuggling,
whose language was gender-neutral and whose subject was implicitly male, as examined in
the previous chapter. Support for the HRC position of changing ‘victim’ to ‘person’ was
particularly strong among INGOs such as the ILO, and the Special Rapporteur on
Violence Against Women.
The convoluted ‘trafficking in persons, especially women and children’ in the title of the
final version of the Protocol was agreed upon by the fourth session (June 1999), without
much debate. Delegates agreed that the Protocol should focus on more than just trafficking
in women and children, but also agreed that the ‘special vulnerability’ of ‘women and
children’ needed to be recognised. This is illustrated in Australia and Canada’s joint written
submission to the Committee for the third session (March 1999), which stated: ‘we have an
open mind as to the expansion of the protocol beyond women and children provided that
emphasis is maintained in respect of the special circumstances of both women and
children’ (A/AC.254/5/Add.3).
‘Specially vulnerable’
Our attempt to shift the focus from the ‘vulnerable subject’ of ‘women and children’ to the
‘rights-bearing’ neutral subject had limited success. The majority of delegates wanted, or at
least did not object to, the Protocol addressing trafficking in men as well as ‘women and
178
children’. Yet, the HRC received little delegate support for the idea of a genderless
Protocol. The delegates decided to emphasise the special plight of ‘women and children’
throughout the Protocol. And, once we had ‘lost’ the effort to remove a focus on women
and children, we had lost the effort to remove any mention of prostitution from the
definition, as these two concepts were completely interdependent.
The exclusion of men from the Argentine proposal, and the fact that it even had to be
discussed at all, is very revealing. The Argentine proposal, with its abolitionist ideology,
would have made it definitionally impossible for men to be trafficked. The linking of
prostitution and gender is also revealed in the ‘special circumstances’ referred to in the
proposal by Canada and Australia. These circumstances are those in which women and
children arrive into through their ‘special vulnerabilities’, that is, through their sexual
vulnerability. ‘Women and children’ meant prostitution – for the delegates, a gender-neutral
subject of the protocol would not be ending up in prostitution, because the trafficking
victim in this document is a prostitute and is female. As sexual vulnerability is gendered, so
the prostitute is female.
This is another way in which the white slave myth influences the perception of the
trafficking victim. Here ideology expresses its hegemonic longings, as the absence of men is
not due to any analysis of ‘evidence’. Men – not ‘children’ – do work as sex workers, and
their presence is consistently disregarded and downplayed by many feminists as a minor
phenomena. Yet, the immense body of work on male sex workers – most of it from the
HIV/AIDS field – indicates that there are a very many male sex workers – and that many
of them migrate.130 It would have been definitionally impossible for men to be trafficked,
because men are excluded from that space of ‘special vulnerability’ that makes it possible
for ‘women and children’ to be trafficked. As I have argued throughout the thesis, this
space is structured by consent.
It is not only CATW’s ideology that had missing men. The ‘liberal’ feminist ideology of the
HRC struggled between making the gendered subject ‘disappear’ and retaining the female
object of feminist concern (without women, where’s feminism?). This is of course one
130
An excellent place for information on male sex work is the NSWP website (www.nswp.org) , as well as
publications by the European Network Male Prostitution (ENMP), which does a lot of work on migration
issues.
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example of the problem of liberalism faced by and challenged by ‘identity politics’. It
reflects the classic feminist dilemma within liberalism – whether to argue for inclusion in
‘universal’ rights or to recognise this ‘neutral’ conception of rights as the basis of ‘women’s
oppression’ (Pateman 1988).
What’s wrong with sexual exploitation?
The term ‘sexual exploitation’ kept delegates busy during the first year. By the third session,
it seemed as though the HRC had made some headway with our strategy to make
‘prostitution’ disappear. When the US and Argentina combined their versions of the
protocol into one document, the US dropped the reference to prostitution in their
definition (Option One). Thus, the definition proposed by the United States changed from
‘for the purpose of prostitution or other sexual exploitation or forced labour’ to ‘for the
purpose of sexual exploitation or forced labour’ (A/AC/.254/4/Add.3/Rev 1).
This was a qualified lobby success for the HRC. On the ‘success’ side, ‘prostitution’ was
removed from one of the definitions being considered by delegates. This was at least
partially due to the efforts of the HRC. We spent a lot of time talking to the US delegation,
and had done our homework in terms of what their position was and what arguments were
likely to carry weight with them. As stated above, the US did not want to appear to be
condoning or endorsing prostitution in any way. At the same time, as co-initiators of the
Protocol, they were determined to advocate a position most likely to achieve consensus.
They were receptive to our argument that including prostitution as a form of sexual
exploitation would potentially block consensus, as states that permitted ‘voluntary’
prostitution would not be able to sign. This was confirmed when the Netherlands and
Germany indicated that they would never agree to a document that defined prostitution as
sexual exploitation.
However, this was only a partial success, because the ambiguous phrase ‘sexual
exploitation’, still contained in the definition, snuck the whore in by the back door. The
term ‘sexual exploitation’ is a catch-all phrase with an abolitionist genealogy. NSWP
members voiced objection to use of the term:
The basic complaint about the use of the term is as follows. The term "sexual
exploitation" is ambiguous and is open to divergent interpretations, depending
upon whether one views sex work as immoral or exploitative per se or as a form of
labor. Frequently the phrase is used to define the position of all people involved
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in the sex industry, even those who work voluntarily under non-abusive or
exploitative conditions (NSWP list 12-04-99).
The HRC urged delegates to reject the phrase, and were supported in this by the Special
Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, who commented that ‘the explicit reference to
sexual exploitation diverts attention from the essence of the abuses targeted by this
Protocol, namely the forced and exploitative conditions under which a woman works’.
(Position paper on the draft Protocol, A/AC.254/CRP.13).
The majority of delegations, however, sought to retain the term, and the US was asked to
provide a definition of ‘sexual exploitation’. The US submitted their definition for the fifth
session (October 1999).131 Sexual exploitation was defined as: ‘Of an adult, [forced]
prostitution, sexual servitude or participation in the production of pornographic materials
…for which the person does not offer herself or himself voluntarily’ (A/AC.254/L.54).
The US definition of sexual exploitation was in line with their position on the Protocol,
which, as we have seen, was that it should only address cases of force in respect to
trafficking.
At this point in the negotiations, the US delegation had not yet felt the full strength of the
religious and abolitionist feminist offensive against their negotiating position (as described
in the previous chapter). The US definition of ‘sexual exploitation’ became one of the
mobilising factors for the CATW offensive. CATW responded to the US definition,
claiming that:
In general, the pro-sex work lobby and some governmental delegations are trying
to edit the terms "trafficking for prostitution" and "sexual exploitation" from the
entire text. With the exception of the definition of trafficking being debated in
Article 2, Option 2, the word "prostitution" is not mentioned in any other article
of the Trafficking in Persons Protocol. The Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women and its partner organizations have responded that since most trafficking is
for sexual exploitation, a trafficking Convention should name and specify the
major purpose for which trafficking occurs (CATW, Prostitutes work, but do they
consent? Dec. 1999)
Delegates at the session were unable to agree on whether or not all prostitution, or only
‘forced’ prostitution should be included in the definition of sexual exploitation, and thus
the term was left in brackets, meaning that discussion and finalisation was deferred to a
subsequent session. The only support we received for the complete removal of the term
131
The fifth, sixth and seventh session were ‘informals’. Though supposedly mere drafting exercises, they
were actually very influential, as the discussion above in this chapter shows.
181
‘sexual exploitation’ was from the Netherlands, with whom the HRC worked closely. At
the sixth session, the Netherlands submitted a definition of trafficking that made no
reference to prostitution or to sexual exploitation, to which the HRC gave their full
support (we had drafted it). The Netherlands had recently set its already tolerant attitude
toward prostitution on a firm legal foundation.132 The Netherlands also considered itself to
be a world leader on trafficking, as one of the first countries to adopt a trafficking law that
allowed a form of temporary residence for ‘trafficking victims’.133
The Netherlands, however, stood alone in this position. State delegations were very
committed to keeping sex somewhere in the Protocol. This is again an example of the way
in which trafficking meant prostitution for most of the assembled delegates. During the
seventh session (January 2000), the Netherlands succumbed in the interest of consensus.
They joined with the US and Italy and produced an amalgamated proposal in which the
term ‘sexual exploitation’ re-appeared.
The seventh session took place after the CATW’s political coalition-building and media
disinformation campaigns in the US and the Philippines, and the ideological temperature in
Vienna had risen markedly. Due to the success of the CATW lobby in the United States,
the US delegation was put under pressure from the US government to portray the US as
strongly anti-prostitution. As a result of this pressure, the US delegation’s opening
intervention at the seventh session consisted of a statement declaring the US to be totally
opposed to all forms of prostitution. At the same time, the US delegation members
themselves were aware that there was unlikely to be consensus around this position. The
US delegation was anxious to achieve consensus, and thus wanted to preserve a distinction
between trafficking and ‘prostitution’ in the Protocol.
132
In another one of the ironies in which the Crimes Commission debate was so rich, the Netherlands had
coupled the recognition of prostitution as labour with a legal provision prohibiting non-Europeans from
engaging in sex work in the Netherlands in the name of stopping trafficking. See West 2000 and Visser 2003.
133 ‘In the Netherlands…in 1988 a special ruling was inserted in the Alien Code, holding that at the least
suspicion of a person being a victim of trafficking that person should be allowed a ‘reflexion period’ of three
months time to consider pressing charges. When the person decides to press charges, she or he is entitled to a
temporary staying permit until the criminal process is completed. In case a person cannot return to her or his
country she or he is entitled to apply for permanent residence’ (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary, Oct 99: para
5, 7)
182
Accordingly, the US along with the Netherlands and Italy drafted and submitted another,
perhaps even more ambiguous definition during this session.134 In this definition,
prostitution was not mentioned. ‘Sexual exploitation’ was included but not defined, but
positioned in the text as a form of slavery, servitude or forced labour. As with other
delegations who opposed an anti-prostitution document, this proposal was less a case of
ideological conviction than a pragmatic realisation that an anti-prostitution document
would likely fail to achieve consensus. Yet, another definition was submitted by a group led
by the Philippines delegation (now strongly CATW influenced as explained in the previous
chapter) supported by Germany and France.135 This definition also left sexual exploitation
undefined, however, it differentiated between sexual exploitation and forced labour and
slavery, leaving the way open for states to define prostitution as sexual exploitation.
This meant that there were three separate definitions of trafficking waiting for delegates
and lobbyists to attempt to deal with during the ninth session, in June 2000. The old
Option One from the second and third sessions remained as Option One, and included the
US definition of sexual exploitation as [forced] prostitution. Option Two from the second
and third sessions [the Argentine definition], was to a certain extent reflected in the US
definition of sexual exploitation included in Option One. Crucially, however, the
genealogically-laden reference to, ‘even with that person’s consent’ – the major difference
between the original two definitions – did not appear in any of the new definitions. The
new Option Two for the ninth session consisted of the US-led informal working group
proposal from the seventh session, in which ‘sexual exploitation’ was left undefined, and
prostitution was not mentioned. Option Three consisted of the Philippines-led informal
working group proposal from the seventh session, in which prostitution was not
mentioned and sexual exploitation was undefined, but differentiated from forced labour
and debt bondage. Affairs were thus not only ideologically tense, but hideously
134
Italy also prided itself on being a leader in terms of domestic anti-trafficking efforts. These efforts
combine one of the most generous right-to-remain policies for ‘trafficking victims’ with some of the most
zealous and repressive deportation campaigns for illegal prostitutes and other migrants. Italy thus typifies, in
its domestic policy, the division between the ‘innocent’ victim and the foreign threat. See Pearson 2002.
135 Germany was included in this group, which was puzzling for the HRC as German domestic regulation of
prostitution (to a certain extent) regulates prostitution as labour. In addition the German delegation had until
this point been very receptive to HRC arguments. Meetings in Germany with a member of the delegation
revealed that key delegation members had been replaced with more conservative members. In addition, the
German delegation thought that the definition proposed by the Philippines would allow countries to
determine for themselves whether voluntary prostitution was trafficking. Germany did not want an antiprostitution document, and fought against this trend in later sessions. The participation of France is much
more readily explainable, as France is a heavily abolitionist country – as abolitionist now as they were
regulationist at the time of the white slavery debates.
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complicated, particularly for many of the delegates who had no legal background and a
poor grasp of the issues.
However, one thing was clear by this point in the negotiations: that our lobby had failed in
its efforts to remove ‘sexual exploitation’ from the definition of trafficking. The term
appeared in all versions of the definition to be considered by delegates during the ninth
session. Thus, the stage was set for the next important issue – whether voluntary
prostitution would be included in the definition of ‘sexual exploitation’.136 Delegates and
lobbyists alike were well aware that ‘sexual exploitation’ ‘meant’ prostitution, but as long as
it was undefined we could argue that there was ‘room’ for ‘voluntary’ prostitution to exist
outside the preventions, punishments and protections enacted by the Protocol. After the
informal sessions, the word consent did not appear at all in the any of the proposed text.
However, in the final two sessions, the issue of ‘consent’ re-appeared.
Consent to trafficking?
At the meeting in June 2000, delegates were thus faced with three definitions. After some
initial debate, it was clear that no progress at all would be made unless the definitions were
combined into one. The chair asked a small group of state delegations, (headed by Brazil),
to meet separately and merge all existing proposals into a new draft that could form the
basis for consensus.137 This ‘informal’ working group returned with the following proposed
definition:
(a)Trafficking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of persons, by the threat or use of force, by abduction,
fraud, deception, [inducement], coercion or the abuse of power, or by the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having
control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation, [irrespective of the
consent of the person]; exploitation shall include, at a minimum, [use in
prostitution or other forms of] sexual exploitation, forced labour or services,
slavery or practices similar to slavery [or servitude] (A/AC.254/l.205).
The terms in brackets indicate language that still needed to be decided; on which no
consensus had yet been achieved. These terms ‘inducement’, ‘irrespective of the consent of
the person’ and ‘use in prostitution or other forms of’ sexual exploitation, were shorthand
136
Like CATW, the HRC did not confine their lobby efforts to the sessions of the Crimes Commission. In
the period between the fifth and the eleventh sessions, we put enormous effort into marshalling support for
our position. HRC members wrote op-ed pieces, (some were even published!) gave interviews, and organised
letter-writing campaigns.
137 The resulting proposal was a combination of Options Two and Three, Option One having been in effect
abandoned by all delegates. See footnote 8 of the draft Protocol for the tenth session
(A/AC.254/4/Add.3/Rev.7).
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for the bitter and intense ideological differences on display in Vienna.138 The differences
concerned the extent to which trafficking should be defined as the result of ‘force’ –
thereby admitting the possibility of consensual prostitution – or whether all prostitution
should be defined as violence. While the terms ‘inducement’ and ‘use in prostitution’ were
resolved without too much difficulty, the phrase ‘irrespective of the consent’ of the person
dominated both the June and October negotiations, with states both for and against
retention of the phrase equally determined that they should prevail.
‘Consent is the wedge’
In their lobby efforts, CATW linked the issue of consent to that of obtaining criminal
convictions, in the process sounding not only insensitive about rape victims, but also
stoking law-enforcement fears about failing to gain convictions. They argued that:
an effective definition of sex trafficking must include ‘with or without the consent of the
victim’’ (CATW, Key cases, the problem of consent, June 2000: 1). If trafficking included
coercion, they warned that:
A narrow definition focused on such conditions allows traffickers to argue, in their
own defence, that their victims were not forced into prostitution but “consented”
to migrate for “sex work”. Consent is the wedge that allows the sex industry to redefine
alleged voluntary trafficking for prostitution as “facilitated migration” or “migration for sex
work” (CATW, Key cases, the problem of consent, June 2000: 1, emphasis added).
Through the trope of rape, abolitionists superimpose consent to a sexual encounter onto
the commercial framework of trafficking in women:
our concern remains…. that the definition of trafficking … if it is limited to a
framework of force, will exclude victims of trafficking from protections they need
and will shield traffickers from prosecution through the “consent” defence, a
familiar defence in the prosecutions of all sexual violence’ (Equality Now, Letter to NGOs,
20-06-2000, emphasis added).
Very many states found this argument about ‘evidence’ very persuasive, and made
reference to it in their session interventions. The CATW caucus had rightly judged that in a
document that was intended first and foremost as a law enforcement tool, arguments
which looked likely to increase convictions would be very powerful. The Thai delegation,
138
The lack of consensus around ‘servitude’ reflected another set of concerns, relating to the status of the
term in international law.
185
for example, who had been very receptive to the Human Rights Caucus arguments up to
this point, reversed its position on consent when it was linked to prosecutions.139
In addition to the arguments linking consent to prosecutions, the CATW lobby group had
success in referring delegates to earlier international agreements. They urged delegates to
adopt a definition that would be in line with the 1949 Convention, and most damagingly
for our lobby, with CEDAW. Many states argued that the Trafficking Protocol needed to
follow the precedent set by earlier international law. These states were convinced of the
need to re-state a link between trafficking and prostitution in the Protocol, and also to
condemn prostitution. As the delegate from the Holy See put it: 140 ‘The definition must
state unequivocally what the crimes are. These should be use in prostitution, especially in
prostitution. We know from NGO statistics that trafficking in women and children is most
often due to prostitution’. She then went on to refer to the 1949 Convention and CEDAW,
using these to argue that ‘clearly, the international community wishes states to fight the
exploitation of prostitution’. An Egyptian delegate, went even further back in time,
referring to the Conventions of 1910, 1921, 1933 and 1949 in his intervention.
The HRC lobby efforts switched from arguing that prostitution should ‘disappear’ from the
definition, to lobbying for the recognition that it is possible to consent to prostitution:
Obviously, by definition, no one consents to abduction or forced labour, but an
adult woman is able to consent to engage in an illicit activity (such as prostitution,
where this is illegal or illegal for migrants) If no one is forcing her to engage in such an
activity, then trafficking does not exist’ (HRC, Recommendations and Commentary, June
1999: para 5, emphasis added).
We had a degree of success with this argument, as a nearly as large and equally implacable
group of states were opposed to using the Protocol to make a moral statement about
prostitution. Or as the delegate from the UK termed it, the Commission needed to have ‘a
legal debate about moral issues’ rather than a ‘moral debate about legal issues’. These states
139
This elision between rape and prostitution is even more clearly evident in the following newspaper article
interview with Pam Rajput, Chair of Asia Women’s Watch:
The defining policy question for activists is, “should the definition be centered around a women’s
consent or the exploitation of women by the trafficking industry?” Rajput says the issue of consent
is nothing but “lip service” by those who profit from it. To illustrate her point she recalls telling
court case. “In India there was a woman who was raped by the police officials and the court said,
“Well, she didn’t shriek enough to indicate her lack of consent.’ So what is this consent? This
consent is a very, very, dangerous kind of notion” (White 2003: 3).
140 The Holy See is allowed to negotiate as a state at the UN. The Holy See delegation was well informed and
highly resourced.
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argued that as force and coercion had already been agreed as the key elements of
trafficking, a statement on consent would be redundant. As the Spanish delegate expressed
it, drawing on arguments given him by the HRC, ‘by definition, no one can consent to
abuse or coercion.’ Furthermore, he argued that including the phrase ‘irrespective of the
consent of the person’ in the definition could falsely give the impression that someone
might be able to consent to force or deception.
Delegates left the June session with the issue of consent no closer to being resolved than it
was at the beginning of the session. The final session, in October, saw nearly all of the
same arguments aired by the same players. Only the very real possibility that the entire
Protocol would have to be dropped allowed states to adopt the compromise definition
given at the beginning of this section, in which ‘consent’ is so placed that all states could
agree with it. In the end, the Protocol’s definition was a compromise: the use of force or
coercion is included as an essential element of trafficking. The definition links trafficking to
prostitution in an ambiguous and confusing manner. While ‘the threat or use of violence or
other types of coercion’ to submit someone to ‘exploitation’ constitutes the crime of
trafficking under the Protocol, it also includes a statement on ‘consent’: ‘The consent of a
victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of
this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have
been used’ (A/55/383: 5). It is clear from a footnote to the Protocol that this should not
be interpreted to mean that states are required to adopt legislation which makes
prostitution illegal.141
In one sense, the Protocol definition is an advancement, confirming the trend towards an
implicit international recognition of the distinction between ‘force’ and ‘voluntary’
prostitution. If states are left free to respond to prostitution within their countries as they
wish, then this allows states that recognise prostitution as labour to join the international
consensus on trafficking. However, it also says nothing about those states whose treatment
of prostitutes contravenes international standards of human rights (see Bindman and
Doezema 1997). The definition of trafficking thus leaves ‘room’ for sex workers to exist
only outside of the protected space carved out for trafficking victims. However, within the
trafficking discourse itself, there is not ‘room’ for the sex worker. The sex worker is
141
This is now contained in the ‘Interpretative notes for the official records (travaux préparatoires) of the
negotiation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the
Protocols thereto’(A/55/383/add.1: 12)
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banished to the margins of the text, left to a precarious existence without the cover of
international law. In distinguishing between ‘trafficking’ and ‘voluntary prostitution’
through the qualifier of ‘consent’, the Trafficking Protocol offers nothing to sex workers
whose human rights are abused, but who fall outside of the narrowly constructed category
of ‘trafficking victim’.
The disappearing subject of trafficking (lose the myth, and who’s left?)
As this thesis has shown, the genealogy of trafficking is grounded in that of prostitution.
The HRC came into the negotiations working from a draft Protocol that was framed in
terms drawn from earlier international law, and which already defined trafficking in terms
of prostitution. The anti-trafficking organisations gathered in the Human Rights Caucus
truly believed that trafficking policy could be done ‘right’; that trafficking could be wrested
free from its historical antecedents and turned into a liberatory discourse. The sex workers
in the caucus were more sceptical, and in the end, we were proved right. As a direct
descendent of white slavery, trafficking in women cannot so easily shake off its inherited
shape. In international law, in national law, and in popular discourse, trafficking in women
has meant prostitution. As events showed, it is not easy to displace this genealogy, to make
trafficking mean something new.
Though the anti-trafficking organisations in the HRC tried wanted to rid the Protocol of
the prostitute, one of the reasons that it didn’t succeed (and one of the reasons that the
myth remains so powerful) was the lack of recognition of their own investment in the myth
of white slavery/trafficking: the continued importance for liberal feminism of sexuality as a
‘site of violence’ and thus the continued importance of the suffering, violated body of the
sex worker even for ‘consensual prostitution’ supporting feminists. Without this body, the
subject of liberal feminist concern ‘disappears’. What could take her place? This
possibilities for finding a new ‘subject’ are looked at in the concluding chapter.
188
Chapter Seven: Towards a reinscription of myth
‘Abolish the prostitutes and the passions will overthrow the world; give them the rank of
honest women and infamy and dishonor will blacken the universe’(St. Augustine, De ordine
2.4.12, quoted in Corbin 1990 :372).
This thesis began by looking at the difficulties posed by attempting to define 'trafficking in
women'. These difficulties, I have shown, are due not primarily to differences in empirical
evidence, but are the result of divergent ideological positions regarding women’s sexuality
sexuality and the gendered meaning of 'consent'. This thesis has shown contemporary accounts
of trafficking to be contemporary manifestation of white slavery narratives. Today's alarminst
political arguments about the dangers of trafficking have been shown to have their roots in the
myth of white slavery. Reviewing feminist and sex worker positions on the matter of
prostitution, I have demonstrated how the notion of consent is central to perspective on
prostitution as a legitimate employment choice, and how these ideas of consent are articulated
in political practice and come to inform policy-making.
Trafficking in women, myth and consent
In this thesis, trafficking in women has been analysed as a myth, the resurrection of the myth
of white slavery. What has been shown about the myth of trafficking? Looking at trafficking as
myth enables us to explain the persistence, appeal, and believability of trafficking discourses.
The analysis of the trafficking negotiations shows the white slave as an awesome poltergeist, a
ghost with the power to move. I have argued that the power of the trafficking discourse
derives from a number of mythical functions: its appearance as a description of reality,
(including through a reification of consent); its function as surface on which social demands
are inscribed; its ability to accommodate differing ideologies; and its function as a metaphor
for key social dislocations. The myth of trafficking has been shown to be not a matter of
factual truth of falsehood; it is because of this that trafficking is so hard to bring into question.
Awareness of 'trafficking in women' as myth shows us how it enacts its performative power
through appearing to be a description of reality. It allows us to shed light on key dilemmas
around defining trafficking in women posed at the beginning of this thesis. One of the ways
189
that myth works is through naturalising symbolic worlds. I have shown how this occurred at
the trafficking negotiations as the symbolic figure of the 'trafficking victim' was reified through
the mechanism of consent. I have shown how attempts to define trafficking in Vienna, to
decide which situations constituted 'real' trafficking, moved round the fulcrum of consent –
just as for anti-white slavery campaigners, consent was the dividing line that distinguished
between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ white slavery. Either all migration for prostitution was to be
considered trafficking, because choice to engage in sex work was considered impossible; or
trafficking was deemed to occur only in those cases in which possible consent was seen as
absent: whether consent was deemed possible or impossible, present or absent, it was the
standard by which the actual situations of migrating sex workers (and others) came to be
determined.
Why trafficking, why now?
In the fifteen years since trafficking has gone from being a concern of feminist NGOs to one
of the subjects of President Bush’s speech 2002 to the UN, in which it was indentified as
threat akin to terrorism, representations of trafficking have multiplied immensely. As this
thesis has shown, the global myth of trafficking in women takes many discursive forms.
Newspaper reports, NGO reports, laws, films and books both fictional and non-fictional – all
these go into the corpus of the myth of ‘trafficking in women’, along with non-recorded vocal
expressions, debates and discussions. The global myth of trafficking, then, is the entire sum of
the expressions of concern, documentation, and fictionalisation of trafficking in women. A
newspaper article, for example, that reports on the SAARC declaration on trafficking may give
only a dry rendition of the events and a summary of the speeches. This is every bit as mythical
as the ‘lifestyle’ piece that stretches tales of woe over 2000 heartrending words (with pictures!).
I have shown that how forms of the myth of trafficking like thesewere used in the political
arena of the trafficking negotiations, as surfaces of insciption for competing ideologies.
How might a view of trafficking in women as myth permit us to make sense of why this
particular feminist concern is so high on the international agenda? As we have seen, white
slavery also went from a feminist concern to a state and international concern, inscribed in
international documents. It is quite astounding that of all the issues raised by feminists, in the
white slavery era and over the last two decades, 'trafficking in women' has been the one that
190
governments – even those notoriously hostile to feminist arguments – have shown themselves
willing to 'jump into bed' with feminists over (under the seductive blandishment of 'consent').
Laclau's handling of myth shows myth as 'incomplete', constantly 'reconstituted and displaced'
(1990: 63). Myths are thus able to accommodate a wide variety of ideologies. White slavery
appealed to purity reformers, feminists, anti-trust activists, conservative and progressive social
groups; all found in the myth of white slavery a way to express their concerns about changes in
society. This thesis has shown how today's trafficking discourses appeal to a similarly wide and
disparate collection of social groups. If myth is indeed, as Sorel proposes, 'identical with the
convictions of a group' (1908: 53), then the myth of 'trafficking in women' it is powerful
because it expresses the convictions of many different, and even opposed, social groups.
This wide range of concerns brings us to another essential element of myth examined in this
thesis: the function of myth as metaphor. The examination of myth as metaphor has shown
how concerns about social change, historical and contemporary, are encoded in the myth of
white slavery/trafficking. This approach enables us to answer questions about why the
discourses of white slavery have reappeared in the guise of trafficking in women at this
particular time. It points us towards the reappearance of key 'social dislocations' (Laclau 1990).
During the white slavery era, the myth has been seen as incorporating and expressing shifting
ideas around sexuality, the role of women, notions of race, and citizenship under the pressures
of social changes of mass global migration, the impact of feminism, urbanisation, and the
'commodification of labour'. It is possible to identify similar seismic shifts in social relations
today. At the Vienna negotiations, as we have seen, trafficking in women covered a wide range
of state and feminist concerns. These included concerns about increasing migration, violence
against women, and the effect of processes of global economic change on women. The
negotiations showed trafficking operating in a like metaphorical function, as the arena in which
shifting ideas around sexuality, the role of women and ideas of labour and citizenship were
contested. I have shown that the myths of white slavery and trafficking are not simply
reflections of social changes, but a key element also involved in producing and contesting
them.
191
Sex work, myth and reinscriptions
Awareness of trafficking in women as myth can help us understand why feminists remain so
invested in discourses of trafficking, even after recognition of its harmful effects for sex
workers and migrants. We recall that myth may be a matter of 'renouncing and reviling'; that it
can be used to promote injustice. Racism and prejudice flourished under the banner of white
slavery, as they do under trafficking today. However, the performativity of myth is not
necessarily negative. It can also encode hopes for emancipatory social change. White slavery
was also used to point to the injustices towards migrants, exploitative working conditions, and
discrimination against women. So too with the myth of trafficking, particular when it is used
by feminists, both abolitionist and 'liberal', to express concerns about actually existing
injustices, including the continued prevalence of violence against women, restrictions on
women's mobility, and the inequities between developed and developing countries.
Finally, then, we are brought full circle: the myth of trafficking cannot be 'disproved' because
it isn't a matter of 'fact': and thus it needs to be 'reinscribed'. Taken with Laclau's arguments
about the necessity of myth, this means the search for new myth, or perhaps, ways to reinscibe
'old' ones. In chapter one, I said that this research also meant for me a realisation of the ways
in which I was also invested in myth. A story illustrates how this realisation was brought home
to me.
During the course of writing this thesis, I spent some time involved in an HIV prevention
project in Andraha Pradesh. While there, a representative of a local sex worker organisation
told me enthusiastically about the theatre performance their group gave as part of their
campaign to increase awareness of the need for safe sex. The plot of their drama had a familiar
ring. The sex workers acted out the story of a poor young village girl, who is approached by a
flashy, handsome city man who promises to marry her. She follows him to the city, where he
seduces her then demands that she earn money for him by sleeping with other men. She has
no choice but to obey, contracts HIV, and at the end of their performance, dies.
While I was familiar with the ways in which sex workers utilise stories of victimisation as a
strategy towards demanding that their human rights be respected, this was the first time that I
192
had heard the white slavery melodrama, as if lifted direct from the tabloids, in such a direct
form. It made me question what it might mean that sex workers were using it. I was reminded
of a comment of Judith Walkowitz's (1996), in which she describes melodrama as form of
political threatre for the working class. This story shows how powerful the myth of trafficking
is. It reveals how myth that speaks to experience – not just an imagining of an ideal world. It
shows how myths can be ‘true’, not factually, but ‘literally’. The sex worker performance was a
dramatisations, apart from questions of morality and virtue, of power and powerlessness.
In its use by feminists and by sex workers, the trafficking myth does encapsulate those
imbalances of power – gender power, economic power, global power – that are ‘real’. That is
why it is so tempting, so powerful, and also so believable. However, the use of the story by the
Andhra Pradesh sex workers also allows us to see how the myth might be reinscrined to
challenge existing power relations. While the form of the narrative used by the Andhra Pradesh
sex workers echoes that of white slavery stories, its meaning is different. The sex workers
followed the performance of the trafficking story by providing safe sex information to the
audience. The story was used in a performance designed to combat the stigma around sex
work, in particular the intense blame laid on sex workers as spreaders of HIV. Thus, the moral
of the story was transformed. As in the NSWP slogan ‘Sex workers: part of the solution’, these
women subverted the ‘trafficking in women’ narrative to reposition themselves from pariahs to
protectors, from fallen women in need of rescue to community educators: experts on safe sex.
The new subject of myth
As the experience of sex workers at the Vienna negotiations showed, the liberal feminist
approach to sex work as 'choice' has 'no choice' but to shuffle the sex worker off the global
stage when faced with the radical feminist epistemological challenge of sex work as 'violence'.
Like rape, when consent is what makes trafficking ‘real’, the determination will always involve
judging whether or not a woman agreed to have sex (for pleasure, money, etc.), rather than on
a set of circumstances which can be more objectively observed and judged. Given the
pressures that women have been subjected to in the name of consent, the abolitionist desire to
do away with the consent standard are completely understandable. Is the choice between
getting away from the thorny issues of consent by denying that it is possible at all (in regards to
193
prostitution) or to accept the problematic distinction that comes from using consent as the
marker between ‘free choice’ and ‘violence’? I return here to the question I posed in the
beginning of this thesis: is possible to find a way to look at prostitution that doesn’t rely on the
consent standard?
The answer to this question forms also the starting point my efforts to replace old myths with
new ones – for a way to deal with the thorny issues raised by anti-trafficking campaigns in
ways that do not oppress or limit freedom. What could replace consent as the yardstick by
which prostitution is measured? I find myself at the close of thesis thus still struggling with the
issue of ‘consent’. As a feminist, my own perceptions of sexuality are deeply entwined with
notions of consent. As a sex worker with a commitment to justice for sex workers, I am deeply
invested in ideas of ‘sex worker rights’, ideas which are similarly tied to ‘consent’. Thus, I find
it difficult to move beyond ‘consent’ and thus beyond a the myth of trafficking framework as
well as conceive of a concept of sex work that does not depend on ‘consent’. Perhaps our
notion of consent was as unimaginable to those who saw the ‘harms’ of sex entirely in moral
terms, as consents’ replacement is to us. Given the power and prevalence of the myth of
trafficking, and the importance of consent to feminist perceptions of sexuality, the task of
displacing consent and thus of re-inscribing the myth will not be an easy one. It presents great
challenges for feminist thought and action, as well as for the thought and action of sex worker
rights advocates.
These challenges are encountered in attempts to replace, or reinscribe, the subject of the
trafficking myth, the ‘suffering body’ of the female prostitute; to change the focus of our
concern from the vulnerable subject (capable of being hurt) needing protection, to the desiring
subject whose primary requirement is not passively confirmed ‘rights’ but a political arena
conducive to the practice of freedom. This will necessarily involve overcoming the
‘voluntary/forced’ dichotomy, and the concept of consent implicated in it, that the myth of
trafficking both depends on and propagates. At the beginning of the thesis, I recalled my
‘epiphany’: that abolitionist feminists had already overcome the voluntary/forced dichotomy in
their ideology of prostitution as per se violence. Because prostitution is defined as violence,
questions of consent become irrelevant. The challenge is to find a way to similarly move
194
outside the constraints of consent, but to do so in such a way that does not involve positioning
prostitutes as victims of violence.
Entering the radical space occupied by anti-prostitution feminists to stake out a place there in
which to articulate a positive stance to sex work presents a challenge to feminist, and liberal,
theories. Taking sex work (even the name may have to change!) out of the liberal feminist
framework of ‘consent’ challenges many of the ideas of the sex worker rights movement and
of feminism. It may necessitate bringing to the forefront alternative ways of thinking about
‘sex work’ that have lingered at the margins of the movement, and may enable incorporation
of settings and experiences that are difficult to fit within a 'sex worker rights' framework. This
includes particularly those elements that have traditionally bedeviled attempts to articulate
liberal sex worker politics. These include questions around 'choice' that arise regarding the
involvement of third parties, youth prostitution, and global power inequities. It may be able to
incorporate the postures which are more familiar to us ‘insiders’ but have often sat uneasily
with the version of politics we argue for to the outside world: the embracing, seeking,
enjoinment of ‘transgression’ vs. the ‘it’s a job like any other’ official line, and the fault line
between ‘sex work’ as work and as identity. It may be a move for sex work politics analogous
to the queering of gay rights politics, with similar opportunities and challenges for political
action: the chief opportunity, the ability to encompass, articulate and imagine a politics of
liberation that moves beyond victimisation, and the challenge to translate these politics into
meaningful political action.
At the level of practice, these opportunities and challenges are already being faced. Moving
beyond the myth of trafficking and towards the framings of new myths that are based on sex
workers’ own perceptions, desires, and hopes can only come through praxis; through changes
at the level of political practice. Some of these are beginning to occur as part of already
ongoing political processes. Sex worker organisations such as the NSWP and anti-trafficking
organisations such as GAATW are attempting to re-position ‘trafficking in women’ by
situating it within broader social movements. Linkages are being formed with migrant
organisations and organisations of workers in the informal economy. It is through these
processes of building solidarity, exploring commonalities, and initiating joint political action
195
that the spectre of the white slave will finally be laid to rest, and from which the subject of a
new, emancipatory myth can emerge.
196
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Appendix I: Research Methods
Identification and analysis of historical sources
The thesis sections that focus primarily on the myth of white slavery were researched
through an analysis of historical sources. The research objectives for these sections were to
identify and analyse the theoretical frameworks utilised by historians of white slavery and to
identify and analyse key white slavery texts. White slavery texts were accessed through the
British Library via the BLDS and the University of Sussex Library, the archives of AntiSlavery International, London and the Mr. A. de Graaf Foundation, Amsterdam. Sources
included monographs by anti-white slavery activists, government reports, reports by antiwhite slavery organisations, newspaper and periodical articles, and international legislation
on white slavery.
Identification and analysis of primary contemporary sources
This part of the research consisted of analysis of contemporary representations of
trafficking in women and the analysis of documents produced by actors in the ‘trafficking
in women’ debates. The newspaper articles in Chapter One were chosen from the StopTraffic list, an English language, facilitated list which provides a weekly update of worldwide English-language newspaper articles related to trafficking, and serves as discussion
forum for list members. The list was set up by PATH and is now maintained through
volunteer efforts. The list facilitators took part in the Human Rights Caucus lobby efforts.
My list membership allowed ongoing review of newspaper articles throughout the research
period.
A second type of significant contemporary literature consisted of both published and ‘grey’
material produced by NGOs such as the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
(GAATW), the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the Network of Sex
Work Projects (NSWP). The bulk of the material studied was produced for the Vienna
negotiations. As a participant in the negotiations, I helped produce a number of documents
and had immediate access to documents produced by other NGOs.
215
The 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol negotiations
Chapters Five and Six are based on my experiences as a member of the Human Rights
Caucus lobby group. Participation in the lobby was initially funded by a grant from
NOVIB. Subsequent participation was enabled through my ESRC studentship. As a lobby
member, I attended the negotiations around the Trafficking Protocol between January
1999 and October 2000. Participation included preparing and reviewing lobby documents,
producing internal reports and reports for funders, as well as attending meetings of the
Crimes Commission and lobbying delegates.
My analysis of the negotiations is based on extensive field notes made during the
negotiations; documents produced by the Human Rights Caucus lobby and other lobby
groups; and official UN records of the negotiations, including statements by UN bodies,
states, and NGOs relating to the Vienna negotiations, as well as the documents produced
in the negotiating process. I also made use of records of the on-line discussion list of the
NSWP, where members commented on the lobby negotiations and worked together to
produce lobby documents. Another important source were personal email records of
discussions of the Human Rights Caucus. Finally, my analysis is supplemented by written
accounts of other participants in the Vienna negotiations.
216
Appendix II: Descriptions of NGOs
The Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW)
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women is an international network of NGOs
working in the areas of women’s labour migration and trafficking in women. It was
established in 1994 in Chiang Mai, and the secretariat is located in Bangkok. GAATW
stresses women’s rights to mobility and advocates against exploitation in the workplace.
They view prostitution and related activities as aspects of labour in the informal sector.
GAATW has advocated for a broad definition of trafficking and the setting of human
rights standards for the treatment of trafficked persons. Their website is at www.gatw.org.
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW)
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women is an international umbrella organisation of
regional networks, local organisations and individuals that works to promote women’s
human rights. CATW has regional secretariats throughout the world. CATW is against all
prostitution, which is sees as ‘sexual exploitation’ and a violation of women’s human rights.
It regards all movement, national or international, for prostitution as trafficking in women.
Their website is at www.catwinternational.org.
The Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP)
The NSWP is an international organisation working to promote sex workers’ health and
human rights. It is composed of regional networks, affiliated organisations, and individuals.
It was established in 1991 and currently has over 100 affiliated organisations around the
world. The NSWP secretariat is located in Rio de Janeiro. I have worked with the NSWP
since 1991 as an organiser, activist and researcher. I have served as the board member for
mobility issues since May 2002. The NSWP website is at www.nswp.org.
Human Rights Caucus (HRC)
The Human Rights Caucus was established for the purpose of lobbying delegates at the
negotiations for the Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and Children. The HRC was made up of anti-trafficking and human
rights organisations who see trafficking in the context of abuses of labour rights, including
sex worker labour rights. The philosophy of the HRC was inspired by the position taken by
the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW). I was a member of the
217
Human Rights Caucus. For information on the Human Rights Caucus lobby efforts, see
www.hrlawgroup.org.
The HRC included representatives from:
The International Human Rights Law Group, US
The Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, Netherlands
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Thailand
Asian Women Human Rights Council, Philippines and India
La Strada, Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic
Fundacion Esperanza; Columbia, the Netherlands, Spain
Nab Ying, Germany
Foundation for Women, Thailand
KOK-German NGO Network Against Trafficking in Women.
Network of Sex Work Projects
International Human Rights Network (IHRN)
The International Human Rights Network IHRN was also established for the purpose of
lobbying delegates at the Protocol Negotiations. The IHRN was headed by the Coalition
Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). It was made up of organisations who view
prostitution as violence against women. Because the names of the two lobby groups are so
similar, I refer to this group as ‘CATW lobby’ in the thesis.
Supporters of the CATW-led International Human Rights Network included:
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, North America, Asia Pacific, Africa, Latin
America, and Australia
Equality Now, USA
The International Abolitionist Federation
Woman’s front, Norway